Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  “This is the horror I sought to stop in Argoth all those years ago,” Urza explained to the presence within him. “This is the horror I still fight, but there will not be another Argoth.”

  Again only silence answered.

  Urza’s eyes glittered in their gemstone aspect. Extending a hand outward, he made a certain sign. One wing of the Phyrexian host swung in upon the other. Fiends leaped on fiends, bit through brains, sliced off heads. With another sweep of his hand, Urza dragged fallen beasts from the dead pile by the wall, digging free his ranks of scorpions. The machines hauled themselves from the slimy darkness where they had been buried and clambered toward the new line of advance.

  “That should hold them for a moment,” the planeswalker told himself. He drifted back down within the walls.

  Below him, scores of machines, students, and scholars fought against the ubiquitous foe. Among them, one gray-haired man battled with an especial fury. He carried only a dagger but made it work like a sword—slashing, striking, parrying, piercing. Already around him on the dusty ground, monsters lay in piles. The dagger he wielded called to the pendant around Urza’s throat. Even more, though, the man drew him. He sank a fatal blow in the dinner-plate eye of the creature he fought, and it spilled sloppily out of his way. Urza alighted where the beast had been and for his efforts got a dagger in the gut.

  He smiled tightly, “Barrin, good to see you as well.”

  Turning white, Barrin drew his blade from the master’s belly. It emerged, bloodless, and the man’s belly and shirt formed themselves behind the retreating knife.

  “Urza, I th-thought you were dead,” he yammered stupidly.

  “Not quite. I have mended the wall and staved off the main attack,” Urza said urgently. “But this must end today. I must go kill K’rrik.”

  “We cannot last,” Barrin gasped, almost pleading, “outnumbered, outmaneuvered…out of breath.”

  “I will bring reinforcements.” So saying, Urza winked suddenly from existence. Like a man stepping across a hall from one room to another, Urza strode across the corridor of worlds and stepped into the forge-room of Shiv.

  A sizable assembly awaited him. Jhoira was at the front of the group, with a rank of twelve modified Tolarian runners behind her—creatures of Thran metal. The platoon of humans numbered thirty-five, and included Teferi and all the other scholars and students brought to the land nearly a decade before. They were serious now, grown-up, and fire-hardened, like the metal they so expertly made. Beside them was a contingent of forty lizard men, including Diago Deerv and the picked warriors of the bey’s personal bodyguard. The young fire drake Rhammidarigaaz accompanied them, along with Karn, the silver man. Next to these clean and orderly troops, a ragtag collection of jumpsuited goblins clustered. Many bore the crude tribal weapons they had brought to the rig five years ago. Others carried only the largest, heaviest, sharpest, or most wicked-looking items from their toolboxes.

  Jhoira stepped forward with a military snap, accompanied by Diago Deerv and a scrappy little goblin with eyebrows that reached beyond his nose. This warrior gave what it considered to be a rigid salute. Jhoira addressed Urza.

  “Your troops are assembled. Your allies have provided more than token forces.”

  “I see that,” said Urza, his eyes flashing on Rhammidarigaaz and Karn. He indicated them and turned to Diago. “You realize, of course, that these two prizes of yours may be sacrificed in the coming battle.”

  “Sacrifice for the tribe is our highest honor,” Diago responded with stern sincerity.

  Urza’s eyes passed one more time over the forces. Despite their numbers and their resolve, they would not be enough. He breathed deeply and said simply, “Come with me.”

  The planeswalking wave that swept out from him encompassed them all in an eye blink. It bore with it Urza’s latest enchantment—a mass effect spell that turned the troops two dimensional while in the space between worlds. Thran-metal walls melted away to whirling chaos. Ancient enemies—Viashino, goblin, fire drake, human, and machine, hung flatly together in the emptiness, and then the company resolved out of air into the boiling battle of the Tolarian courtyard.

  There was no time for orders. There were no columns marching into battle. There was only space for a breath and pivoting on one heel and striking whatever horrific figure loomed blackly up out of battle. The jangle of Thran-metal paortings joined the clang of goblin axes on carapace. The silver man fought with bare hands and gargantuan strength. The fire drake, the only beast that was a match in size for the gibbering monsters, slew with tail and claws and teeth and breath—all.

  Tolaria’s defenders gave a ragged cheer as the monsters faltered.

  But it would still not be enough.

  Urza planeswalked again. He left Tolaria for the lofted aerie of the ancient dragon, Gherridarigaaz. In moments, he appeared in the woven nest as he had before—sudden and stunning, businesslike.

  “It is I, Urza Planeswalker,” he announced.

  The drake was huge and red against the great weave of tree bough and tar. She raised a grizzled head and regarded Urza angrily. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I can regain you your son, Great Gherridarigaaz.”

  Her head came erect. “Say on.”

  “You must fight for me. You must fight for me and the Viashino and the goblins. Your son fights for us, even now. I will take you to the place where Rhammidarigaaz is, and you must fight side by side with him, ally yourself with us, and save us in battle, and your son will be returned to you.”

  A suspicious glare entered the beast’s narrowing eye. “Fight whom?”

  Urza’s eye was a sharp mirror of the drake’s. “You must fight the enemy of us all, the creatures that would kill every last one of us, the monsters at the door.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the drake slyly. “Urza and his Phyrexians.”

  “I have no time for games,” Urza said sternly. “Come with me now and fight to regain your son, or do not come at all.”

  The drake lifted herself to her full, impressive height. She drew her wings tightly about scaly shoulders and darted her massive head in beside the planeswalker. “I go.”

  Urza took hold of the beast’s shaggy mane and climbed onto her long neck. “Unfurl your wings,” he ordered, “and prepare a gout of flame.”

  The drake complied. Her leathery wings stretched to their full extent.

  “We go,” Urza said.

  With a thought the deed was done. Urza and the dragon folded into immutable geometry. Planar creatures, they careened through the pitching corridor of space. In moments, the veil of that middle place dropped away, replaced with rushing treetops and a bright, cloud-cluttered sky. Urza and his drake regained their third and fourth dimensions. Wings unfolded into rushing air.

  Ahead, the Tolarian academy huddled on the hillside. Ropy black pillars of smoke rose from it. Gherridarigaaz gave one magnificent sweep of her wings. Pitching treetops rolled away. The drake broke out over the battleground. Below, monstrous creatures ran in their loping hundreds toward a thinly defended wall.

  Drawing a deep breath, she hurled fire down on the Phyrexians. They burned away to greasy black smudges on the littered earth.

  A cheer rose up from behind the academy wall. The great dragon soared and banked out over the Phyrexian gorge. Ballistae bolts leaped up from the rent and cracked past her wings. With a single surge, she climbed beyond their reach.

  “Yes,” Urza shouted to the creature through the wheeling winds. “Fight beside us, and you will have your son.”

  Then he was gone.

  He stepped from the back of the wheeling beast.

  The next moment he appeared elsewhere, in a peaceful corner of Tolaria.

  His feet came to rest on a dam of rubble and mortar. The mighty barrier diverted water from the Phyrexian gorge. To one side of the broad pile of stone l
urked the dark dome of K’rrik’s fast-time loop. To the other side lay a vast, blue reservoir, water saved from the dank depths of the gorge. The lake was placid and mirror-still, far from the mad battle. Fishes darted through its depths. Trees around its edges cast their souls in its surface.

  “Forgive me,” Urza said simply.

  Force blasted from his lowered fingertips. It pulverized the dam and hurled Urza into the air. Rocks separated. Water burst forward. The flood turned suddenly white, bearing in its brunt scouring teeth of rock and lime. It roared over the precipice and punched into the gorge. The belly of the lake slumped downward and followed.

  Urza plummeted into the blue wall of water. It bore him along.

  It would disguise him.

  It would protect him.

  He would not be torn by crosscurrents of time.

  He would not be impaled by ballista after ballista.

  He would not even be seen in the jetting flood.

  And once within the time rent, he would destroy the spawning grounds where these Phyrexian monstrosities were made, would hunt down K’rrik and kill him, and would cleanse Tolaria forever of the Phyrexian menace.

  * * *

  Jhoira brought her Thran-metal sword crashing down onto the head of a gigantic fiend. She split the creature’s sagittal crest and sent it sprawling back against the broken wall of the infirmary. The beast’s divided head came to rest against the sill of a second-story window. Within that window, more monsters preyed on the bed-bound patients. Giving a roar, Jhoira climbed the sloping corpse of her foe as though it were a staircase. Her sword crashed against the glazing and sent a spray of glass within. Roars and screams burst outward. Another swipe of her blade bashed flat the toothy shards of glass at the base of the window. She clambered over the sill.

  Many of the patients were already dead. The rest had put up the best resistance they could with crutches and canes for weapons. One of the more alchemically minded students had made impressive use of the various anesthetic compounds in the chamber. He had also concocted blast powder in small vials and kept three Phyrexians at bay by casting exploding philters at the feet of the attackers.

  Coming up behind them, Jhoira swung her sword at the thick, reptilian neck of one of the monsters. The Thran-metal blade sliced through flesh and bone like a knife through water. The head lolled free and toppled toward Jhoira, its eyes rolling and rows of triangular teeth snapping. By instinct alone, she caught the snarling thing by one pointed ear and thrust it away from her.

  One of the beast’s comrades—a giant with a wattle of bristly flesh—spun about to engage her. Its jaws roared open for a bite that could cut her in half. Again in reflex, Jhoira rammed the snapping head in the path of the teeth. The head clamped its dead bite on the living beast’s tongue. Jhoira hardly had withdrawn her hand before the larger Phyrexian chomped down on the severed head. Bone and tooth crunched and burst outward in a tangle of flesh that lodged itself chokingly in the giant’s wattle. It gasped and staggered aside, retching. Jhoira ended its agony with a jab up one nostril and into the creature’s frontal lobe. It fell with a sick roar, wrenching Jhoira’s blade from her hand and pinning it under its body.

  A sharp pain exploded in her side. Jhoira flew limply across the room to crash into the wall. Something stalked toward her, a huge something with gray-scaled skin, small insectile eyes, and ears that flared into venomous spikes. It cast aside cots with the same ease it had cast her aside. Jhoira struggled backward but got caught in a tangle of canvas and broken wood. The beast lunged. Its claws spread wide.

  Abruptly, against its gray bulk, there was a small figure in white. In one uplifted hand, the figure held a metal case filled with vials of the yellow-gray powder. Next moment, vials and case both were gone, rammed among the teeth. The monster’s head blasted away, pelting the room with its pieces. The vacated corpse slumped heavily atop Jhoira.

  “Are you all right?” Jhoira shouted into the sudden calm.

  Her rescuer had spoken the exact same words. He rolled the dead bulk of the beast off of her, ducking away, and pried her sword from the other body.

  “I’m all right,” they assured each other, again in unison.

  Jhoira gladly received the blade. She thanked the slight young man who handed it to her.

  “Do you think you can make a stand here? Do you think you can hold the door and keep more of these things out?”

  “Yes,” the young man said bravely. “Yes, if nobody climbs in the way you came.”

  Jhoira struggled up and staggered to the window. The yard between the infirmary and the academy wall was nearly deserted now, occupied only by hundreds of dead Phyrexians, humans, Viashino, and goblins. Even Rhammidarigaaz had left the courtyard, taking wing with his mother. Together beyond the wall, they roared down from the skies, sending lines of fire and sulfur into the host there.

  “There should be no more attacks from that quarter, unless they breach the wall again,” Jhoira guessed. She strode toward the infirmary door. “The battle has moved inside. It’ll be room to room now. Can you hold this one?”

  “Yes,” the man repeated.

  “Good,” Jhoira said and strode out into the hallway.

  A great ruckus poured from the Hall of Artifact Creatures ahead. Sighing wearily, Jhoira ran toward the sound.

  A room-to-room battle, with her friends in the rooms—Karn in the observatory, Teferi in the great hall, Diago in the master’s study, Terd in the cellars, Barrin in the rectory, and Jhoira herself in the Hall of Artifact Creatures. A small smile played about her lips. What Phyrexian host could be a match for a group like that? She would have to remind Urza, as he constructed his flying warship, to make sure to man it with the best of crews.

  Her face darkened. She would remind Urza if they both lived through the day.

  * * *

  Urza rose from the vile sludge at the base of the canyon. With an exertion of will, he sloughed the muck of dead fish and tenacious seaweed from his robes. The shallow lake churned with the flood that poured into the gorge behind him. Up in the Phyrexian city, though, all was still. Barrin had been right. K’rrik had thrown every able creature into the assault, wanting at long last to eradicate the school. The only Phyrexians who remained were ballistae crews, sentinels, and those incapable of passing the temporal barrier. Chief of those was, of course, K’rrik.

  There would also be another crop of vat-grown monsters. Urza would not leave until they all were dead. From decades of observation, Urza knew where the mutagenic labs lay—deep within the basaltic extrusion on which the city was built. With a thought, he was in a dark, deep cavern.

  An aisle of vats extended ahead of and behind him. Stonework stanchions stood between panels of smoky obsidian. Behind these panels were bays of glistening oil—Phyrexian blood and placental fluid. K’rrik had likely filled these cells by draining thousands of his citizens. The emptied husks would then have been diced and jerked to make food for the creatures developing in the tanks. Phyrexians had switched from natural to artificial means of reproduction when placentas began, in utero, to consume their mothers from the inside out.

  The grotesque figures within these tanks seemed utterly capable of matricide. Though immature, most were the size of a full-grown human, with nictitating membranes over large and rheumy eyes, knobby shoulders, soft claws, oil-breathing lungs, and rows of legs, some thickening into actual limbs and others withering and dropping away, leaving only hip-nubs. In a number of the dark vats, vestigial leg bones hung from the half-formed teeth of the blind beasts, a snack between scheduled feedings.

  Urza was sickened. He rose toward the cavern ceiling, out of the aisle of vats. It dropped away beneath him, revealing row upon row of vats beyond. One hundred, five hundred, twenty-five hundred…A network of bone catwalks ran above each row. Across the ivory causeway, machines scuttled, dipping probes into the glistening oil, dumping chips of
dried meat onto the heads of hungry creatures, and skimming waste from the top. Urza recognized pieces from his falcon engines in the design of these nursemaid machines.

  No wonder K’rrik has sent the whole city on this attack. In months of his own time, mere weeks outside, K’rrik would have a whole new city, a whole new army.

  Not any longer—as Urza drifted up into the dark vault of the cavern, he lowered his hands, spread his fingers, and sent great blue flashes of lightning down into the vats. Where the bolts struck glistening oil, massive plumes of fire rose. The figures within the oil writhed. Blue-white sparks traced out their curved fangs and the venom sacks beneath their throats. Arcs leaped finger to finger, knee to toe. The creatures convulsed, churning the oil, feeding the fires. In moments, flames wreathed their exposed heads, and then mantled their shoulders, and then girded their hips. Thick skin burned and cracked and split and curled back, looking like bark. Muscle cooked. Bones burst. One by one, the waiting army of K’rrik stewed where they stood. At the last, as all the glistening oil flared into the air, the sudden intense heat change shattered the obsidian shells. Shards of glass and bits of burnt Phyrexian scattered down the aisles.

  More lightning flared; more vats erupted. Half of them were gone. Urza panted, feeling the drain of power on him. He would recover quickly, of course, and needed only one spell to slay K’rrik. Until these all were destroyed, Tolaria would not be safe. Blue

  energy leaped from his fingers. Orange columns of fire blazed in the cavern night. Black clouds of soot and smoke belched up to roll at the height of the chamber. Dizzy with exertion, Urza blasted the last of the vats and watched as their inhabitants burned in putrid pyres.

  This ought to flush out K’rrik.

  Urza stopped breathing. The air in the space could be nothing but sheer poison. He lifted his eyes wearily toward the vault. There black smoke rolled in the deeper blackness of the cave. Something else moved there, too, something silvery and fleet and…