Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Teferi crowded up beside her and confirmed her thoughts. “This is where those other channels empty. They are meant to power the machinery in the forbidden zone.”

  “We’ve accounted for only thirty percent of the lava tubes. If the other seventy percent were used for these other devices—”

  “What would take that kind of power? What if it was mutagenic research, the kind of thing K’rrik’s been doing?” Teferi volunteered.

  Jhoira was dubious. “I can’t imagine using such thermic power to create clone creatures. K’rrik certainly doesn’t have that kind of power. Mutagenics comes more from tampering with the power of growing things. Remember the stories of Ashnod? Vats and chemicals and muscular fusion—”

  Teferi’s reply was wondering. “You really listened to all of Urza’s lectures?”

  Pushing onward down the corridor, Jhoira said, “The cool, dank air comes from ahead. There must be a big room up here.”

  Crawling, they came to a tight bend in the passage—a kink, as Teferi called it. Beyond, the passage widened and dipped into a debouchment with a pair of open doors. The chill in the air was undeniable here. The rustle of clothes slipped outward into silence before coming echoing back at them.

  Jhoira extended her arm, powerstone held on her open palm. The light was too feeble to show up anything. Even with Teferi’s glowing crystal alongside it, the space ate up the light.

  “Well,” Jhoira speculated, “either we venture blindly forward—”

  “To fall into some open pit or other—”

  “—or we try to find another light sconce or two.”

  “Here’s one,” Teferi said, slipping his powerstone into the bracket. As light leaped blindingly outward, Jhoira fitted her powerstone into a niche on the opposite side of the room.

  The resulting glare filled the vast chamber, driving shadows back beyond a vault of riveted ribs. Metal struts and trusses lined the walls and ceiling, shot through by more tangles of pipe-work. The countless tubes—bristling here and there with valves and pressure gauges, pumps and release valves—entered the room through walls and floor, snaked in writhing piles of pipe across the chamber, and converged on a great central mass encased in scaffolding many stories high. To compare the network of tubes to vessels surrounding a giant heart would be to vastly underestimate the number of tangled channels. They formed a veritable thicket, through which the central mechanism was hardly distinguishable.

  “What is it?” Teferi wondered, staggering to his feet before the massive machine.

  Jhoira rose also. “Maybe you were right about the mutagenic experiments.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  Teferi brushed dirt from his coveralls and started forward. He clambered over a dust-mantled manifold, noting the small ladders and causeways that gave access to them all.

  Jhoira followed. Each footfall sent lint rolling up into the air. “It looks like the forbidden zone has truly been empty for some time.”

  “Unused, but not empty,” Teferi ventured, pointing to a small, three-toed footprint on the far side of a cluster of pipes.

  An adjacent channel held a three-fingered hand print. More tracks led away from the spot, into the lurking shadows behind the main mechanism.

  “It’s as though somebody watched us approach and scrambled away when we lit the place.”

  A wary look crossed Jhoira’s face. “We’ve seen enough to make a meaningful report to Urza.”

  Teferi ignored the implication. “There’s a porthole on the side of the main machine. It’s only ten paces farther.”

  Without waiting for her approval, the young man strode onward. His footfalls obliterated the skittering tracks he had discovered. Jhoira fell in step behind him. Shadows deepened. The glare was reduced to triangular bright spots cast in kaleidoscope across the metal-plated bulk of the mechanism. Teferi and Jhoira reached the porthole. Teferi wiped centuries of dust from the face of the glass.

  A dagger of light stabbed through the porthole glass and glinted across something within. The explorers crowded together at the window and gazed in.

  “By the stones of Koilos!” Jhoira gasped.

  That huge gem—the powerstone that had sundered at the touch of Urza and Mishra, driven the two into their fratricidal war, and opened the door to Phyrexia—could not have been a larger, more perfectly formed crystal than the stone at the center of the dark chamber. Beside it, glimmering in their hundreds, were many more gems, fist sized and double that, all lying in a dark jumble. If charged, any one of them could have powered a dragon engine.

  “That’s why this place is forbidden,” said Teferi with awe. “It is a trove of powerstones.”

  “Not a trove,” Jhoira said. “This is a machine for making them.” In the moment of that staggering realization, Jhoira made a second. She hissed, “Teferi, we aren’t alone.”

  The two whirled to face a toothy wall of short spears, thrust their way. Behind the savage shafts, small red eyes squinted in wicked little faces. Light from the wall sconces outlined the creatures’ rumpled brows, their pointed ears, their wiry frames, and the obscene proliferation of bristly hair from ears and moles and shoulders.

  “Goblins,” Jhoira said.

  Teferi raised his hands to cast a spell, but a ragged net fell over them both, interrupting the enchantment.

  The net cinched tight. The wall sconces went dark. The spears converged.

  * * *

  They came from everywhere. They came from the caves where they had hidden from the Viashino patrols. They came from crevasses that sliced down into their underground warrens. They came even from the forbidden zones of the mana rig itself.

  Goblins.

  They came from everywhere, and they came in their thousands. Many of the hip-high invaders were the red-scaled Destrou clan that inhabited the hillsides around. They bore polearms surmounted by sharpened ram’s horns, which curved close enough to their heads to leave ragged cuts along the creatures’ shallow pates. Their long ears were pinned back—a sign of all-out war—and their prominent noses flared with battle howls.

  Others were gray-skinned Grabbit goblins, somewhat smaller than the Destrou but nastier in combat due to their tendency to bite with small, serrated, and invariably filthy teeth. They also employed body slams, wearing studded-leather jerkins, breeches, and putties. Hurling themselves screaming into battle, Grabbits swarmed their victims, biting and spinning, shredding with teeth, claws, and hunks of metal, bone, and stone sewn into their clothes. They were savage, relentless, and formidable foes—but they weren’t normally allies of the Destrou.

  Nor were the third group of invaders, the silver-scaled Tristou goblins. Tall and thin, Tristou occupied the distant ridges of the caldera. Not normally a warlike race, Tristou were bone-rolling oracles and goblin visionaries given to week-long trances that yielded lengthy and largely unintelligible predictions of doom. Since the arrival of Urza, Tristou prophets had foreseen an upcoming war that would unite the goblin tribes. It would be an all-out battle against the Viashino.

  The day of that war was at hand.

  The Viashino and their human allies had desecrated the holy necropolis. Destrou sentries had captured two humans peering into the gemstone tomb. No goblin had looked upon that sacred place in a century of centuries for fear he would be struck dead by the ancestral spirits that dwelt in the stones within. These two humans not only gazed into the space but shone a light into it and hadn’t even the courtesy to drop dead.

  The united tribes determined the violators would drop dead—the violators and their Viashino allies. Word of the atrocity spread like wildfire from Destrou patrols in the necropolis, to the Grabbit warrens that riddled the volcanic hillsides around, through the steam tunnels and the guard posts stationed at the head of the sulfur vents, and to the distant oracle caves of the Tristou. The wave of angry whispers crashed upon these far shores
and then returned, bearing on it a unified army of thousands of goblins. They bore torches and scourges, claw-headed warhammers, notched cleavers, dart-tubes, acid bladders, nets, daggers, teeth, claws, and the will to use them in all-out war with their neighbors.

  They would fight to the death, and the two human hostages they held would assure their victory.

  * * *

  Urza had been working over his prototype Thran-metal man when the alarm went off. He looked up, gemstone eyes glinting in frustration. Whenever Jhoira and Teferi were off-duty, the alarms were almost continuous. Closing his eyes, Urza rubbed his temples. The sites were only mental projections, of course, but thus were all the more susceptible to psychosomatic ailments such as muscular tension and nervous spasms. He opened his eyes again. The half-assembled metal man stared blankly back at him.

  It wasn’t working. Thran metal grew. He had not recognized that fact before. He had assumed only that Jhoira’s trinket necklaces were fashioned in various sizes. Now he knew that the large lizard pendants had grown from small ones.

  The pieces of the Thran-metal man were growing too. His chest plates were already grating against each other and binding up the shoulder joints. Worse, the clockwork gears ground together, breaking off cogs, bending shafts, shattering flywheels. Even as Urza sat there, considering the slowly deforming mechanism, a great clang announced the sudden catastrophic failure of a strut in the creature’s pelvis, and a groin plate slumped ignominiously.

  Urza slouched back in his seat, wondering how long this alarm would be allowed to blare. The mana rig was like a giant bucket, amplifying the clamor until it was unbearable. Around the ringing corners of his mind, Urza chased an elusive thought…something about aligning growing parts according to the geometry of life, so that the pieces could expand in concert rather than in opposition….A sphere shape or a three-dimensional oval, with internal mechanisms organized in nested shells, would allow for the growth of each level and that of the whole. Even in the shrieking air, he recognized the irony of designing a machine after the plan of Phyrexia with its nested planes. His gaze strayed to the abandoned plans for the Thran-metal ship—it was ovoid. Perhaps he could use the concentric organizational plan to structure…to allow the Thran metal…organization with the…make a growing—

  “Enough—!” shouted Urza at the reeling ceiling.

  The alarm was suddenly louder, jarring into the room with a flung-back door. Urza whirled angrily, seeing the silver man crouching in the too-small space.

  “What is it?’

  “Goblins. Goblins everywhere. Three tribes. The Viashino are losing,” Karn said in a rush.

  “That’s it,” Urza growled, standing and growing a war cloak about his shoulders.

  The stylus he had been holding grew into a glimmering staff, and he strode ahead of the silver golem, out the door and toward the battle.

  * * *

  The forge room was chaos. Viashino workers in their leather coveralls fought side by side with disheveled, human students. Wrenches and spanners flashed among double-bladed paortings, wrist daggers, and dragon-headed throwing axes. The lizard men fought in ragged clusters, backed up against the vast, glowing furnaces they tended. With desperate jabs and off-balance swings, they held at bay the loud, lapping tide of goblins.

  They were everywhere. Gray Grabbits swarmed at the front. They hacked and gnawed at knees. Red-scaled Destrou crowded up behind their short comrades and swung ram-horn polearms above their heads. Here and there hooks caught lizard-man sleeves or wattles and dragged the victims onto the impaling gray horns. Behind that line, a few silver-skinned Tristou held the center of the floor and flung fire and lightning into the defenders’ ranks.

  Viashino were falling. Already seventeen workers and four warriors lay in pools of gray blood among the advancing goblins. Grabbits fed violently on these dead forms. Two more lizard warriors hung smoldering on the sides of furnaces. They had been backed against the sizzling metal, and their skin adhered. A few flailing minutes followed, and then the cooked reptiles turned to coal. Two human students also had died, one impaled on the end of a stolen paorting, and the other beneath the toothy tide of Grabbits. The remaining defenders, outnumbered, ill-armed, and overheated, languished in the verge between fire and spear.

  Diago Deerv brought a gaping wrench down on the head of a Grabbit before him. It staved the beast’s skull. He kicked the body among the mass of its comrades, giving them something besides him to eat.

  “Where is Jhoira?” he gasped out to the workers around him. “She’d have an idea.”

  “An idea?” roared a nearby mechanic. A goblin torch rammed against his chest. The lizard man reared back on his tail and kicked the fire-wielding monster back among his fellows. The torch set another pair of Grabbits aflame. “We need an army, not an idea.”

  Diago blinked at the burning Grabbits. “Sometimes an idea’s worth an army.” He whirled, pulled a forge pole from its rack beside him, and slipped its hooked end into a large latch on the side of the forge.

  “What are you doing? We’re fighting goblins, not forges.”

  “Get back!” Diago shouted forcefully.

  His comrades fell back. and in the next moment he flung open a slag gate in the side of the forge. Out poured a river of molten metal, spilling across the goblin hordes. Even the heedless and senseless Grabbits retreated from the blistering flood. Many weren’t quick enough, swept under the tide and exploding as every liquid in their bodies turned instantly to gas. These small blasts sent red-hot spatters of metal out to burn other goblins.

  Panting behind the flood, Diago gasped out, “Gives us a moment to breathe.”

  The warrior beside him was prickly, his scales jutting out all across his body. “I’d rather die by spear than by fire.”

  Diago looked up, toward the wide stairway that led down into the forge room. “Maybe we won’t have to die at all.”

  Another tide rolled down the stairs—Viashino warriors, fully armed and armored, their paortings gleaming in a thicket as they waded into battle. Above the tide of warriors, another figure came, floating above the floor and emblazoned with fiery light. Urza Planeswalker drifted down, a second sun above his army. From his fingertips, bolts of power lanced outward. Where the red crazings struck, goblin bodies flipped up into the air. They tumbled like charred toys before clattering to the ground.

  The straggling defenders let out a cheer.

  Urza hovered into the center of the forge room. He lifted his hands together overhead. A white light awoke between his fingers. It shone across metal struts and trusses that hadn’t been illuminated in millennia and then swept out in stunning waves. Rings of illumination moved over the gathered monsters, stilling them in the midst of battle. Upraised cleavers did not fall, frozen in air. Scourges followed one last course before going limp in the hands of their wielders. The magical staves of the Tristou flared and became rods of fire before fizzling away into sifting ash. In his last labor before the stilling waves of magic lay hold of him, Diago hauled hard on his hooked staff, drawing the slag sluice closed and stopping the flood of metal.

  Next moment, even the war cries died away. All eyes turned to the floating figure.

  Urza shouted over the throng. His voice was guttural, a collection of growls and harsh barks. The words, nonsensical to humans, made sense to the goblins and their ancient lizard foes.

  “Surrender, all goblinkind. Throw down your weapons or face immediate destruction.”

  He made a sign, and three goblin figures—taller and more elaborately mantled than their fellows—rose into the air. The three chieftains kicked in struggle against the invisible claws that gripped them. They drifted toward the imperious figure.

  Below them, among the goblin rank and file, nerveless claws opened, letting cleavers and axes fall to the floor. Grabbits withdrew, bloody mouthed, from corpses. Destrou dropped to one knee in sign of surr
ender. Tristou stood, spells forgotten on quivering lips. Even as they did, the pacifying waves of white energy gently cycled among them.

  “I will speak with your chiefs about terms of surrender,” Urza announced to the room.

  He made a final gesture, bringing the floating creatures to a stop before him. They hung uncomfortably in the air, their robes of state trailing in bloody tatters.

  Urza examined them. His uncanny eyes rested on each in turn. The Tristou chief was a wizened old creature, his eyes large and solemn behind a nose as withered and dark as a date. His robes were once fine—midnight blue with silver piping, though a scorch mark showed where his staff had blazed away. One claw had been burned brutally. Beside him, the chieftain of the Destrou was a warrior female, clad in gray leather armor from which taut red arms and legs protruded. She wore the scowl of bitter undefeat and kept her eyes lifted defiantly in the presence of her foe. The third chieftain was a mad imp, its small body wrapped in bloodied armor studded in teeth and metal shards. It fought angrily against its captivity.

  “I am the lord of this rig,” Urza said in forceful goblin tongue. “You and your folk will withdraw. None of you will be left within five miles.”

  “These are our ancestral homelands,” objected the silvery Tristou.

  “You were permitted to live here until you attacked,” Urza pointed out. “You have brought about your own exile.”

  “Our attack was provoked,” the Destrou warrior chief said. “Two of your lieutenants desecrated our sacred necropolis.”

  “That does not matter,” Urza said dismissively. “You have been utterly defeated. Withdraw from this facility and the lands around, or I will slay every last one of you who remains.”

  “We hold these lieutenants captive,” the Destrou continued. “We hold them in a death cage. It is linked to me. At a moment’s notice, I can make the cage collapse with them inside, killing them instantly. If I die, they die.”