Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Urza studied the warrior woman. “You are lying.”

  “Their names are Jhoira and Teferi,” the warrior chief replied.

  Urza began a response. but the words jumbled on his tongue, and he quieted. He breathed, perhaps for the first time since entering the forge room.

  “Take me to them. I must see they are alive.”

  “No,” the Destrou chief replied. A file-toothed smile spread across her face. The tables had turned, and she savored the shift. “But you may speak with them.” She nodded to the Tristou oracle, who used his charred claw to draw a black circle in the air.

  Noises came from the circle—the jabber of goblins, the crackle of a fire, the shift of midnight winds.

  “Teferi, Jhoira,” Urza called, “can you hear me?”

  A shifting sound came, and the clang of metal. “Who is it?” came a woman’s voice.

  “It is Urza. Where are you?”

  “We don’t know. A dark cavern. They have us in a strange cage.”

  “Is Teferi with you?”

  The young man’s voice answered, “Yes.”

  Urza’s features darkened. “What is this they tell me about you desecrating their sacred necropolis?”

  Teferi sighed. “We went into the forbidden zones. That must be what they mean.”

  Urza turned to the silvery oracle. “Your sacred necropolis is within the rig?”

  “It is sacred to our ancestors. They dwelt in it, long before the lizard men,” responded the Tristou with a twitch of his prune nose. “They dwelt in it with the old masters.”

  Before Urza could respond, Teferi offered, “It looked like it was designed for them. Everything is goblin sized—corridors and ladders and consoles. Viashino couldn’t have operated or maintained any of the machines we saw.”

  The silvery oracle blinked placidly back at Urza.

  “Are you saying your ancestors served the Thran?” Urza asked in hushed tones.

  “There’s more,” Jhoira interrupted. “That sector of the rig—the largest sector—is devoted to making powerstones.”

  The planeswalker, despite himself, turned white.

  The oracle spoke into the following silence: “Now, do we surrender to you, or do you surrender to us?”

  Monologue

  Urza arrived today with strange and marvelous news. He has just brokered a peace accord between five races.

  Yes, Urza Planeswalker—defiler of Argoth, scourge of Terisiare, bane of Serra’s Realm, destroyer of Tolaria, he whose name has become synonymous with mad and savage war—Urza has brokered peace. Viashino, Tristou, Destrou, Grabbit, and human now work hand in claw within the mana rig. To make matters more incredible, the two human prisoners of war caught desecrating the sacred necropolis of the goblins have been set in charge of returning the goblins to their ancient homelands in the rig and training them once again to run the machinery there. And, most incredible of all, what Jhoira, Teferi, and their goblin hordes will be producing are powerstones—large and perfectly engineered for whatever task Urza wishes.

  He seemed mad again, relating all these things to me. He seemed as delighted as if he had just finished designing some vast, improbable, and powerful machine. In a way, that’s what he has just done.

  I was sad to report less stellar results for my own efforts. K’rrik’s negators are growing more powerful by the week. Our laboratories can hardly keep up with the old designs. New versions of our runners are still months away from their initial trials. The spells we have marshaled have succeeded in blocking whatever summoned creatures and artifacts the Phyrexian mages have conjured, but we cannot keep up with their studies. I sense a final conflict coming. Even if K’rrik’s forces do not overrun us soon, we will deplete our resources and workforce. Whether they win in a moment or in a million moments, they will win.

  It was with this assessment that I pleaded for Urza to return and bring Jhoira and Teferi with him. He shrugged off the request, saying he had complete trust in me. Be reminded me of the beacon, saying I could call on him at a moment’s notice, and that was the end of it. He couldn’t wait to return to his mana rig and the marvelous machines it would produce.

  I cannot help feeling abandoned. Urza has learned much, indeed—he no longer forgets his past obligations, only ignores them.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  “This is our salvation,” Urza said.

  He addressed the same group of scholars—Jhoira, Teferi, and Karn at the head of the group—in the same study where he had first presented the design. The plans hanging behind the pacing master, however, were completely rethought. Thran metal was used only in key places. The rest of the structure was wooden.

  “It will be capable of faster-than-sound travel, will be able to planeshift, will be fitted out with powerful offensive weapons, and is designed to bear its crew into the most hostile Phyrexian environments. It will be the ultimate strike weapon, arrayed to penetrate the enemy’s defenses and destroy the heart of their attack.”

  Urza paused, as if waiting for Jhoira’s objections. She coughed discreetly in her hand but offered no comment.

  “One of the key changes to this design, you will notice, is its wooden hull. Given the properties of Thran-metal—specifically its tendency to grow—I have determined that it is best used in conjunction with living materials, in this case wood—a specific kind of wood.” Urza set down the pointer he had been using. “Given the excellent progress you have made in the new alliance, I feel the time is right for me to take a brief absence to secure the wooden components.”

  The once-silent crowd was suddenly on its feet, protests coming from them all.

  “What are you talking about—”

  “—bring us to this inferno and then leave—”

  “—how are we supposed to keep them from killing each other—”

  Jhoira’s voice rose above the others. “—only reason the accord has worked as well as it has is because you are here, the everpresent and incalculable foe.”

  “Let them think I am still here then,” Urza said. “If you want, I can even arrange a few illusory appearances during my absence. I’m speaking of only a few days away.”

  That assurance quieted much of the objection. Jhoira was still dubious. “What if it is longer?”

  Urza seemed to consider, his eyes twinkling, and then he gave a small shrug. “You will manage. You always have. In the meantime, I have some new specifications for Thran-metal castings—the fittings for the ship. I want you to get started on them. Also, I have these specifications for the size and shape of the powerstone I need for the ship’s engines. Jhoira, I want you and Teferi personally to oversee its creation.”

  * * *

  Urza descended into the heart of a dense jungle, into the heart of an ancient dream.

  It was called Yavimaya. Its ancient trees reached three thousand feet into the sky and three thousand feet into the ground, and three thousand years into the past. Just beneath Urza’s feet—shod in gold-gilt sandals, suitable to his role as ambassador for all Dominaria—spread the tumbled landscape of treetops. Multiheaded crowns nodded sagely in the high winds. Among their shifting forms, giant limbs twisted, as large and brown as whole hillsides elsewhere.

  In the hollows of some of the massive boughs, clear waters gleamed in wide and twisting lakes, thirty feet deep above smooth-skinned bark. Daily rains filled these raised lakes. Their verges hung with shaggy curtains of moss, and elven settlements crouched at their edges. Waterfalls cascaded from the lakes, down bows or empty air into the darksome forest below.

  Urza did not stop among the elven folk. He sought none of the forest’s inhabitants individually but all of them collectively. He sought the spirit of the forest itself—Yavimaya.

  In places, a magnificent tree had succumbed at last to the colonies of worms and termites that riddled its city-sized trun
k, or to the rot of deep roots in lightless slime, or to the implacable time clock within it, and had fallen. Many dead giants leaned against their neighbors, forming vast decaying ramps down into the murk. On such slopes, whole new ecologies of undergrowth and grazing beast and sharp-eyed hunter grew up. Other trees, the titanic ones that could not be held aloft in their creaking plummet toward ground, opened vast pits in the forest canopy, giving view down thousands of feet, past the mounded and rangy bulk of the world trees to the tangle of roots at their base.

  Urza entered one of these empty shafts now. He watched in appreciation as the huge sprawl of tree summits rose to close out the sky. Only a large, ragged hole remained overhead. All around him, single-tree forests shivered bright green against the blue sky and its scrolling clouds. The high brakes of branch and bloom gave way to lower ranks of coiling vine and draping lichen. They in time surrendered to dark, cold, plunging depths, reached only by manifold waterfalls and the ever-dimmer sunlight. The air turned cold, wet, and biting.

  Urza formed a thick, woolen cloak atop his silken robes of state. The fabrics fanned out on the cool wind, making him seem some great black spider descending an invisible thread.

  In time, his gemstone eyes adjusted to the murk. He saw whole new worlds around him. The curved boughs were inhabited. Giant antlike creatures swarmed blackly over a knot in one of the ancient trees. The rotten center of the knot formed a great archway that gave into an enormous interior chamber. As Urza slid downward, he peered past guard ants poised at the brink of their colony and saw into the teeming blackness inside. There hunks of fruit and severed segments of leaf and dead carcasses of tree goats were borne along in caravans to inner storage places. Translucent white larvae lay in careful nests tended by tireless workers. A queen, who was the size of a parade of elephants, laboriously dragged her moving bulk, leaving a trail of wet globs in her wake. Just below the colony, placid herds of long-horned cattle grazed on terraces of bark. These beasts were tended by the ant creatures as though they were mere aphids in a garden.

  A sheer drop lay beneath the cattle fields. A few hundred feet farther down, giant cobwebs clung. They held rolled white pouches—some vaguely cow-shaped, others ant-shaped, and still more with human or elven form. Urza was careful to steer clear of the sticky strands of web in his course toward the bottom.

  Wherever life could cling, it did. Villages of elves dwelt on shallow swoops of tree bark. Forest sprites lived in spangled beauty among the deep dew fields. Dryads peered out distrustfully at him from folds of bark, and naiads glared from the silvery cascades that dropped from aerial lakes. Tree goats bounded up the sheer faces of the tree boles. Black-and gold-skinned cats stalked among fields of moss. Beneath it all, on the tangled roots at the base of the trees, druids appeared once in a while. They stared up at Urza in fierce resistance before disappearing beneath the ground.

  He gazed down at the root cluster. As vast as the boughs above, the roots of the trees climbed over each other in a muscular jumble. In places, the tightly laced structures held dark pools of water or small banks of new tree growth. Where the roots did not connect, though, were triangular wells of darkness. During millennia of growth, the trees had depleted all the earth beneath them, drawing it up their boles. The result was a vast emptiness under the root cluster, broken only by more waterfalls and fat taproots. At the distant base of this murk, waters toiled in perpetual darkness. This was the realm of the forest druids, crisscrossed by thousands of causeways, stairs, and cave passages.

  They would put up a fierce resistance to any program Urza might suggest. They would know of Argoth.

  As Urza settled his gold-gilded feet on the root bulb of a massive tree, a sudden dread rose through him. This place was uncannily like Argoth. Its elves descended from those who had fled the forest he and Mishra had destroyed. There were ghosts here, the ghosts of Urza’s past, but he had not come to commune with ghosts. He had come to discover the future.

  Urza lifted his hands in invocation. “I am Urza Planeswalker. I have come for an audience with Yavimaya. We must discuss the coming war. I wish to ally myself with you. We must confer upon the fate of our world.”

  * * *

  Multani had known the invader even before he spoke his name. The forest recognized the monster much as a body recognizes a contagion it had once suffered.

  Defiler of Argoth, Destroyer of Elves, Terror’s Twin, the End Man, Slayer of the People of the World—Urza Planeswalker.

  Even as the man descended through the foliage of the upper forest, Multani surged up the bole of a great magnigoth tree. He gathered himself in myriad surges of sap and pulses of green wood. From the roots of that ancient colossus to its spreading crown thousands of feet above, the magnigoth came to exquisite life. The soul of the forest quickened every twig and leaf and tendril. Multani could have flexed the massive roots like the tentacles of a squid and marched the enormous tree through Yavimaya. He could have reached out with any of the magnigoth’s hundred thousand boughs and snatched Urza and crushed him. He could have slain the man ten thousand times, in clouds of mold dust or swarms of arboreal spiders or lashing storms of boughs, but he did not, not yet.

  This man was no mere man. He had become a power since Argoth. He had drawn the might of the land into him and was perhaps a match for Multani and Yavimaya. He had become a planeswalker and could wink into and out of existence with a thought. It would take a careful trap to capture this one. It would take all the mesmerizing force of the forest’s mind to drive from the planeswalker any thought of escape. Only then could he could be contained. Only then would Argoth have its vengeance.

  Until then, though, Multani would seduce the planeswalker into a trap. He watched patiently, following Urza down the trunk of the great tree. He would marshal the might of Yavimaya and lead Urza into doom, just as surely as Urza had led Argoth into doom.

  A pang jagged through Multani. The man was calling on the land. He was summoning its power as he had back in Argoth. He was daring to compel the forest he said he had come to consult.

  Multani sifted all the faster downward, hurrying to reach the spot where the man stood. No matter how many creatures Urza summoned, this was Multani’s forest. He would take them back, free them from the bidding of the Defiler.

  To treat with Yavimaya, Multani thought bitterly, you must treat with me.

  * * *

  Urza had finished his invocation, but the forest had not answered. He stood for some time, letting the verdant air sift over and around him. He could wait, of course. The forest knew he was here, sensed his power as assuredly as he sensed its, but Urza was never content to wait. He always felt better if he could tinker.

  He reached into his vast reserves of sorcery and summoned forth a swarm of sprites.

  A flowing cloud of gold and silver cleaved from the treetops high overhead and danced down on the breezes toward him. Urza watched in silent amazement. Though the cloud was still a thousand feet above, his gemstone eyes made out the tiny darting creatures within it. Winged and delicate, the sprites approached, a high song in their tiny throats. The melody ranged hypnotically through many tonal structures, sinuous and ineffable. Soon Urza could make out words in the song.

  Return among us, child of ages.

  Sing the reconciling song

  And burn the pages where long

  The sages condemned thee.

  Sing, forgetful, sing

  Of mild, regretful things

  Before the forest’s nodding head.

  Let dead bury dead and then

  Arise to sing again.

  The words plucked strangely at Urza’s mind. He remembered those voices, small and chimelike against the waterfall roar of wind in the leaves, remembered sprites fighting among druids and elven archers, their voices raised then in fury and condemnation. These creatures sang, instead, of reconciliation. They sang as though they were miniature Barrin
s.

  Delighted, Urza moved to cast a second summoning spell. The sorcery was never completed. Already the forest responded. New ambassadors arose.

  To the convolute roll of the gnat song came also a slow, low, gulping sound. It came from among the roots of the oriatorpic trees—shadowy gnomes within their barrows. Their tones made a basso counterpoint to the whistle-high melody.

  O nations, rise into the dawning light

  Where, bright, our generations’ hope has come.

  Speak, O dumb, and dance, O lame, the night

  Of blame advances round to sun

  And morning comes again.

  Urza stood in the midst of the swelling chords, daring to hope that this ancient forest had grown up outside of the pall cast by Argoth’s death. Perhaps short-lived sprites and gnomes would simply not remember that time. The folk who would not forget, could never forget, would be the elves. Urza needed to know their mind.

  As though summoned, they came—elves of the high forest.

  They came from behind every tree, from within every fold of root upon root. Their eyes were bright and wide in the gray twilight of the place and glowed, luminous and green. They came, singing too, their voices at last providing the main body of the chantlike round of the other creatures:

  Hello, Urza, we know of you

  From dark times past that nearly slew

  Us, every mother’s son, and tore

  Our bodies limb from limb. That war

  Was hateful, true, but now we live

  In peace and health. We wish to give

  You all you ask, to save

  Our world from such a grave

  As once you dug that terrible day.

  The three groups of singers converged around Urza. Sprites danced in glowing daisy chains in the air around him. Shadow gnomes scuttled from their burrows to crouch like toads upon the moss beds. Elves treaded with preternaturally light footfalls among the roots. Urza listened to their singing—his mind could hear each strain separately and all of them together. His foot lightly tapped the root ball where he stood.