Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Gherridarigaaz. The great drake herself lay in the opposite corner of the nest. She seemed at the moment only a huge pile of red skin, scales, feathers, and fur. Her great muzzle oozed twin streams of smoke. Soot tangled languidly among her spiky brows and rangy mantle. A pair of massive claws lay beside her face. Wings of skin folded over her flanks. The creature’s scaly tail coiled on the rock-hard base of the nest.

  Urza stepped toward the creature and said, without preamble, “I am Urza Planeswalker. I can kill you with a thought. I will kill you with a thought if you make any move to harm us, and I will kill you unless you cease your attacks upon the Viashino settlement.”

  The drake slowly lifted her head. Giant lids drew back from slit-pupiled eyes, filled with gold and black striations. The beast spoke. Her voice was vast and purring. “Not much for parley, are you?”

  “Our message is understood,” Urza said with finality.

  “Understood, yes,” the drake responded. “Obeyed, no.”

  “You have no alternative,” Urza said.

  “I do have an alternative,” Gherridarigaaz corrected. “Death is an alternative.”

  “What creature would choose death over life?”

  “A mother would,” came the immediate response. “You have clearly not been a father.”

  Urza cast a long glance at the silver man at his side. “I have been a father.”

  “Oh, yes,” purred the drake in remembrance. “Urza Planeswalker. I’m well enough aware of human mythology. Yes, you had a son. Harbin was his name. You blinded him when you destroyed Argoth. Some say you even sank his boat and killed him.”

  “I tried to keep him away from the war,” Urza replied as if in reflex. “What I did, I did to save all Dominaria.”

  “You sacrificed your son to save the world,” the drake said. “That is the difference between us, Planeswalker. I would sacrifice the world to save my son. I will not give up the fight to free him.”

  “Rhammidarigaaz chose to leave you. He chose to join the Viashino.” Urza pointed out.

  “Your son chose to join the war.”

  Urza’s features drew into an angry knot. “I could kill you now.”

  “Yes, you could, Planeswalker. History says you would, but why, then, am I still alive?”

  Urza cast one last, fierce glance at the creature. “You have been warned.” With a thought, he and the silver man departed the fiery aerie.

  * * *

  Barrin ran. Fronds slapped him. He thrashed through underbrush.

  The thing behind him was huge and sinuous. It slithered in his wake—a giant python, muscular, fleet, silent and cold-blooded. Its homed head was as large as the mage master himself. If it unhinged its jaw, it could swallow him whole. Two man-sized bulges distended its gut already.

  “There have to be sorceries to defeat this thing. I know hundreds of them. It’s just a matter of thinking…something about swamp-walking—?”

  The mage master ran. He had been in the heat of combat when the thing had broken through the line. The beast’s sudden appearance had interrupted a complex casting. Mana burn had lashed Barrin. He had fallen back. Jangled, he had racked his brain for a defense but found none and ran.

  This thing wasn’t Phyrexian. It was summoned. The python had been invoked by a Phyrexian capable of casting spells. That was new. Apparently K’rrik had been decanting time-resistant mutants long enough to raise a wizard from their ranks, a wizard or two—or perhaps a small army of them. The giant serpent behind him was not only a terrifying man-eater, it was also a harbinger of greater evils to come.

  Breath sawed Barrin’s throat. Vines clawed his arms. The creature’s cold breath billowed out around him. It almost had him. He redoubled his speed. Think! Think! Treacherous ground stole his feet. With a curse, Barrin tumbled. He crashed through a brake of undergrowth and smashed against a tree.

  The serpent coiled into view. It reared up on a broad, shimmering belly of scales. Its mouth glimmered with teeth. Its jaw yawned wide and dislocated.

  Barrin clawed behind the tree trunk. He hissed instinctually and glared into the thing’s eyes.

  “What is that summonation spell Teferi is working on? A creature that can cross time streams…Not the imps, but the other one—Teferi’s Duck? No, that’s wrong.”

  The monster coiled rapidly around the mage. It looped the tree and lunged.

  “Teferi’s Drake!”

  A yellow-skinned dragon phased into being beside Barrin. It spread its wings in the tight confines of the jungle, and its head darted about angrily. Though the python was gigantic, in the shadow of the drake, it seemed only a worm beside a chicken. The drake’s head jabbed downward. Its beaklike mouth snatched up the python.

  The serpent writhed in the monster’s mouth. One of the man-sized lumps in it convulsed too, whether in defiance or digestion, Barrin couldn’t tell. Arching its neck backward, the yellow drake sucked down the python and swallowed it in one gulp.

  Barrin slid back down beside the tree, panting in dread. If he had been killed by that python, there would have been no one left to summon Urza, no one to lead the students. And there would be more giant pythons, more minions of evil. More Phyrexian mages…

  How many wizards does K’rrik have?

  Into his musings came the acute realization that the summoned drake stared down at him. Its eyes were at once empty and accusing, like the eyes of Karn. Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, it phased out of being.

  That was the flaw in Teferi’s spell. To date, the creatures he summoned could cross time rifts but remained in existence for only minutes. Barrin had known of this side effect, but he had been desperate. The drake had been created only to fight, disposable.

  How like Karn….

  * * *

  Karn sat on a stone escarpment on the mountain side of the mana rig. The ceramic arteries beneath the structure glowed with pulsing lava, pumped up from the caldera below. Within the plant, massive articulated arms would be cranking huge shafts. Steam shot in vast columns from the top of the rig. The whole thing rumbled and roared in a foul-tempered fury. The rig seemed a great beast, crouching in the red-black sunset, hissing into the sky, slurping from the lava pool.

  They had brought it to life. After a year and a half of labor, Jhoira and Teferi and Urza had brought it to life. Jhoira had proven herself yet again the critical connection between Urza and the folk under his command. Teferi had come into his own as an innovative leader and mage. Together they had achieved an uneasy alliance between the human students and the Viashino workers. Urza, meanwhile, strong-armed the drake Gherridarigaaz out of attacking the facility. Even his presence was enough to reduce the constant goblin border battles to only sporadic incidents. The mountaintop was ruled by an iron fist in a velvet glove. All had progressed according to plan, and the first new castings of Thran-metal were only moments from being poured.

  They had brought it to life, but Karn felt dead.

  Perhaps it was because Teferi had replaced him as Jhoira’s closest companion. Their work to vivify the facility had made the close contact necessary. Their species had made the close contact welcomed. Karn felt no jealousy about this growing relationship and even was happy for Jhoira to have a friend made of flesh and bone. But between her work and Teferi, Jhoira no longer had time for long strolls or afternoon conversations with the silver man. He wished again for those bleak days together in the guard towers of Tolaria, but that was not what dragged at Karn.

  No, the feeling of dread and death came from the sentence on his life. When all was said and done, he would belong to the lizard men. Urza had offered to move his intellectual-affective cortex to a new shell of Thran-metal, though the man could not promise Karn’s mind would move with it.

  With a sudden roar, the facility erupted into motion. Though the forbidden sections of the rig remained dark, windows across the rest of
it flared with light. The very walls of the great machine rumbled and glowed. The patient roll and plunge of the facility’s crankshafts and pistons accelerated to a deep and trembling drone. Jets of steam above the facility coalesced into a great, sooty cloud that blotted out sun and sky both and enwrapped the rig and the silver man in a choking fog.

  He sat awhile longer, shrouded in gloom. The forges would be firing, the metals forming, the molds filling. Within the structure, a new army of metal men was being born. Outside of it, an old metal man was being killed.

  All around him, small red eyes emerged from nearby crevices and caves. Unseen by the downhearted golem, goblins ventured up to the very verges of the rig, stood atop each others’ shoulders to peer into windows, and set hundreds of tattered claws to whatever loose plate or door gap presented itself.

  In one place, they found their way inside, hundreds of them.

  Monologue

  I do miss Urza, Jhoira, Karn, and—yes, I’ll admit it—even Teferi. Their labors on the island before they left have given us a solid defense against Phyrexian incursion. I can only hope their labors in Shiv will do the same for the world itself.

  K’rrik’s machinations advance exponentially. Just because our artifact machines can repulse his current generation of negators does not mean they will repulse the ones that emerge in a few months—let alone any more negator mages who might make it out. We tracked down and slew the one who had summoned the python, but there will be others.

  The students, colleagues, and I work hard to improve and adapt our designs, to suggest new machines and to create new spells, but even our fastest fast-time laboratories run at half the speed of K’rrik’s.

  It will come down to a final conflict—both here on Tolaria and out in Dominaria at large. To win our little war here, we’ll need Urza and Jhoira and all the others. To win the coming conflict, we’ll need a new machine, one designed by Urza himself, one that can adapt to anything, one with firepower greater than that of the whole island.

  Urza started a design before he left. Perhaps he has finished it by now.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  “This is our salvation,” Urza said.

  He paced before the array of plans. They filled the semicircular wall of his high study in the mana rig. The room was an approximation of his library back on Tolaria, though the books that lined the shelves here were largely Thran, unreadable to anyone but Urza. Tonight, the shelves served to hold tacked plans, the latest wild imaginings of the artificer genius. With a slim pointer cast of the new batch of Thran-metal, Urza indicated the sleek structure of the device.

  “It is a flying machine, made entirely of Thran metal. It is driven by a matrix of powerstones, which take up much of the hull. With these stones, it is capable of faster-than-sound travel. Power can be diverted from the drive systems into various gun batteries—”

  “What is it for?” Jhoira asked.

  Among the group gathered, including Teferi, Karn, and a handful of other top scholars, the Ghitu woman seemed the only one willing to question the master.

  Urza pivoted mid-sentence and looked at her, blinking. “Why, it is for war, war with Phyrexia.”

  Jhoira’s brow furrowed. Teferi’s hand clamped over her arm, but she spoke all the same.

  “The metal and powerstones needed to construct that ship could be used to make armies of warriors, which would be more effective against armies of fiends.”

  “Armies are slow,” replied Urza. The lamplight of the darksome study glimmered from his queer eyes. “This machine will be able to move like lightning for quick strikes against specific targets—targets such as dragon engines and landing craft.”

  “How many such engines do you suspect the Phyrexians will have?”

  “Perhaps hundreds,” Urza said grimly, “perhaps thousands.”

  “Shouldn’t we plan to build hundreds or thousands of machines like this?” Jhoira asked sensibly.

  Urza looked nettled. “There aren’t enough active powerstones on Dominaria to build two of these devices and any mechanical defenders.”

  Jhoira sighed, crossing her arms. “As fantastical and appealing as this idea might be, it seems to be impractical in the extreme. Unless we find some underground trove of powerstones, we must make the best use of the few we have.”

  A fiery light glimmered in Urza’s eyes, and he seemed on the verge of snorting. He placed the tip of his Thran-metal pointer on the table and pressed upon it. The rod trembled with the master’s anger. Instead of breaking, the metal only made a jagged line across the obsidian top. Wheeling, Urza tore the plans down from the wall, crumpled them, and flung them savagely in the corner.

  “No more delays. I want the prototype Thran-metal man completed this month.”

  * * *

  Teferi finished undoing the final bolt, pulled away the age-crusted grating, and gestured Jhoira into the dark crawlway beyond.

  “The plans say that this space leads into the heart of the forbidden zone.” His eyes gleamed with mischief. “The secrets of the mana rig await.”

  Jhoira glanced around again, trying to make sure no Viashino patrols were coming down the passage. “I think this is a mistake. If the lizards find out—”

  “Tribal law forbids Viashino from entering the forbidden zone. It says nothing about humans,” Teferi said, and his smile glinted in the dark space. “Besides, you promised. The metal works have been running at full capacity for a year now. I’m well overdue.”

  A laugh of resignation came from Jhoira. She shook her head, staring in amazement at the handsome young man. “Yes, Teferi, you are well overdue.” She paused. The cloud of bygone days passed over her eyes. “You followed me down another passage like this, once.”

  Teferi only smiled.

  “Some things never change.”

  So saying, she drew a dimly glowing powerstone from her pocket and waved it in the cobwebbed crawlspace before her. Taking a deep breath, she entered it.

  Teferi followed closely behind. The space was tight, its height slightly shorter than Jhoira’s thigh, its width slightly thinner than Teferi’s shoulders. The effect was claustrophobic. Instead of an actual crawl, the two explorers had to move forward with an inch-worm motion. Even so, the shaft did not seem an air duct. The floor was too solid, the walls were sided with moldings, and in places along it, constricting the space further, dull-edged hooks jutted from the walls.

  Getting caught on one of these for a third time, Jhoira halted. She half-turned, panting, and let the dim glow of her powerstone reach out through the passage ahead. The walls, ceiling, and floor regressed to a gray-black square of emptiness. A cool, dank breeze came from it.

  “There’s got to be a reason it is forbidden,” Jhoira whispered, sending sibilant echoes both ways from them.

  “Yes, because whatever is in there is valuable, precious—”

  “Perhaps even deadly,” Jhoira finished for him. “It occurs to me that since this was your idea, you should have been the one leading.”

  Teferi didn’t respond immediately. The sudden silence made Jhoira nervous. She craned her neck to make out the man. His powerstone flickered, and wedges of light danced wanly about them.

  “Jhoira,” he said at last, voice awed, “these hooks in the wall. You know what they are?”

  “Triggers for deadfalls,” she ventured wryly, “or poison darts?”

  “Lamps,” Teferi said, answering his own question. “These are lamp sconces. Look.”

  He lifted his powerstone toward the small curl of metal jutting near the top of the wall. The stone pulsed brighter as it rose, showing up a small, shiny parabola, and in front of it, a clip in a sconce. Teferi positioned the glowing rock in the clip, and suddenly it flared.

  The explorers fell back, shading their eyes. Bright ribbons of light coursed out around them. Soon their eyes adjusted to
what had once seemed a blinding glare, and they saw the hallway clearly. That was what it was, a hallway made for creatures much shorter than the two humans. The floor was composed of venous marble, the walls of riveted metal, and at even intervals along the passage, lantern sconces hung.

  “Who was it made for? Viashino?” Jhoira wondered aloud. “They’d have as much trouble as we are getting down this passage.”

  “Maybe the ancient Thran were little guys,” Teferi speculated.

  Jhoira shook her head. “Don’t you remember the stories of Urza and Mishra finding the first ornithopter? Its seat and controls were human sized. No, this must have been someone else.”

  “You mean that someone other than the Thran built this place?”

  “No,” Jhoira responded, “I mean that the Thran built this place for someone else to run.”

  “A slave race?”

  “Perhaps.” Jhoira pivoted. “I see something ahead, off to one side. It looks like a doorway.”

  “Lead on, but be careful. Some of the Thran slaves might still be around.” Teferi withdrew his powerstone from the sconce, and immediately the hall was plunged into darkness. It took awhile for their light-acclimated eyes to adjust to the murk.

  Taking a deep breath, Jhoira inched forward until she reached the doorway. It was a short opening and narrow. The space beyond breathed hot, dry air past her. Cautiously, she extended her powerstone into the swimming blackness. It showed up a set of ceramic pipes, conduits crawling over each other like the viscera of some great leviathan. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could make out, low in the tangle of tubes, a number of the greater pipes glowing faintly with the heat of the lava they carried.