The Thran

by J. Robert King

  The next artificer was an old man, white-haired and resigned. He had endured a half-century of politics in the artificer’s union, had survived a shifting empire, and hoped to live beyond a few more moments.

  Yawgmoth stood over the man. He stared down. “This is only a technicality, you realize. I myself can sit these seats, command this sphere. You save no one by denying me. You save yourself by indulging me.” His sword slid into position on the old man’s neck. “It is your decision.”

  Nodding quietly, the artificer said, “What is your bidding, Lord Yawgmoth?”

  A satisfied smile spread across Yawgmoth’s face. His sword did not move from the old man’s throat. “I want you to signal the Thran artifice creatures in Megheddon Defile.”

  Closing his eyes in concentration, the old man moved his hands dexterously across the powerstone matrices in his command chair.

  “You want me to shut them down?”

  “No,” Yawgmoth said happily. “I want you to turn them on the Thran. I want you to command them to destroy their own people.”

  * * *

  —

  At midday, the battle shifted.

  Groans rose from ten thousand mouths. Thran and dwarf, elf and Viashino, minotaur and barbarian, they peered from behind corpse bulwarks to see.

  The Thran artifact armies were falling back. Mantises whirled about and loped toward the entrenchments. Lancers hauled their silvery shafts from dead Halcytes, turned the bloody things around, and charged. Shredders ceased chewing through Phyrexians and rolled toward Thran.

  “This is no retreat,” Dwarven Commander Curtisworthy gabbled. With his remaining hand, he grabbed his battle-axe. “This is betrayal.”

  In moments, the killing wave of metal and flesh crashed over the commander.

  A mantis warrior surged up before the wall of bodies and clawed the top corpse from the pile. Razor mandibles scissored in the thing’s face. An unholy glow came from its blood-crazed eyes.

  Commander Curtisworthy swung his axe into clockwork jaws. Edge met edge. The axe clove into the machine’s face. It bit deep, splitting shiny panels. The mantis’s head gapped open. Gears and wires were laid bare.

  The mantis did not stop. Axe wedged in its face, it clambered over the remains of the wall. The six-legged machine towered above the one-armed dwarf. Its foreclaws were lightning-fast. It grappled Curtisworthy’s head to crush it.

  The commander hadn’t released his axe. Roaring, he wrenched the blade yet imbedded in the mantis’s face. The silvery skull split like a walnut. Beneath it lurked knobby gear-work. Glassy eyes drooped from ruined housings. The mantis’s frame shuddered, suddenly rigid.

  The axe swung free. Curtisworthy did not. The mantis still clutched him. Hanging above the bloody ground, he brought his blade up for a final stroke. The edge split the mantis’s skull. Yellow steam jetted from its sundered head. Curtisworthy bounded back, yanking his head from the raking grip of the war machine. The mantis collapsed.

  Curtisworthy surveyed the battle. The front had swept past him. Rogue artifact creatures, Halcyte guards, and Phyrexians scoured the field. There was not a living ally in a hundred yards.

  Worse—a Phyrexian loped wolflike toward Curtisworthy. It was a horrible thing, with pink skin bursting atop impossibly large shoulders. The same unholy forces that had stretched the clavicles of that beast had extended its jaw bones into a pair of wicked tusks. Teeth crowded the mouth above, and fire filled compound eyes. The Phyrexian vaulted forward, shrieking.

  Curtisworthy hurled his axe into the thing’s path. His aim was true. The blade struck the Phyrexian just as it had the mantis warrior—in the head. It chopped through toothy face and sinus cavities and brow ridge. It cut through the cerebral sac and into the brain.

  Two swings and two kills, both with his left hand.

  Except that this wasn’t a kill. What unmade the metal warrior could not stop this Phyrexian. The brain that oozed from that cleft was no vital organ. Only the lizard mind was needed to fight like this—

  With filed tusks and bloodied teeth, the Phyrexian bit through Curtisworthy’s good arm. Skin and muscle split. Bone crunched. Teeth met teeth. There was blood, lots of blood.

  Curtisworthy fell on his back, staring up at the thing. It had once been a man, but now what was it? Hackled and horrid, the monster hunched against the blazing sky.

  Was this the future for the Thran? Was this the future for all Dominaria?

  Dwarven Commander Curtisworthy turned his head away. If this was the future of Dominaria, he did not wish to see it.

  His final vision was stranger still. As his lifeblood gushed out of him, he saw a vast gray orb—a moon hanging so low in the sky there was no sky. He could not imagine what this thing could be. It gleamed brilliantly. It cast a blinding light on Halcyon but threw the defile in deep darkness. Into that valley of death, the army of the Thran Alliance fled.

  “What can it be? What can it mean?”

  He saw something small drop from the belly of that great sphere. It fell into the center of the defile, into the midst of the fleeing army. The blackness suddenly vanished in an otherworldly radiance.

  Dwarven Commander Curtisworthy smiled one last time and was gone.

  Two Years Before the Thran-Phyrexian War…

  After the Untouchables’ Uprising, it took months to heal and rebuild Halcyon.

  First were days of black smoke. Columns rose from pyres into the sky. Mocking winds plucked at and shoved the ascending soot. Funereal ash drifted down on the living. Flecks of gray stuck to red roads amid bug swarms. Immolated flesh sought out drying blood, the two reanimated in the bellies of flies.

  Even when pyres ceased, sooty clouds spiraled tauntingly above the city. The bucket brigades that had squelched roof fires now washed gory streets. A sickly smell filled the air. Blood clung to boots and tracked onto every floor. It lingered beneath fingernails and in the folds of hands. They would not get that blood out, not ever. It seeped into the spaces between cobbles and washed down in great septic rivers beneath the city. It spun in dust clouds and slid into Halcytes with each breath they took.

  No sooner had the dead been burned and their blood washed from the surface of things, than the processions of mourning began. In each district, on each terrace, they sprang up simultaneously. The public rites were ancient but nearly forgotten after centuries of peace. The folk wore black and sack. Effigies of death were chased down the streets. Swine were flogged until they bled. Trumpets wailed in ghost songs at all hours. For a time, Halcyon immersed itself in the witchery of human grief.

  These parades even braved streets where health corps workers and Halcyte guards tore down gutted buildings, rebuilt rooftops, mortared walls, and labored in every other way to rebuild. The same young warriors who had defended the city now raised it from the ashes. The people loved them. The people loved Yawgmoth.

  It is love more than any other force that overcomes grief. Months passed. The dead lingered only in memory and in the hue of the cobble cracks. The city was rebuilt. Even the temple—the greatest symbol of hope the Thran had ever known—was rushed to completion. Yawgmoth knew the mood of the people. They were ready to climb out of despair and celebrate victory. Yawgmoth would give them a city more beautiful than ever.

  Today was the day—the dedication of the temple and the first day of the Feast of Victories. There were many victories: the end of incursions from below, the imminent demise of phthisis, the completion of the temple, and the beaming hope of Yawgmoth’s paradise. Many in the Elder Council believed today would also be the perfect ceremonial moment for Yawgmoth to relinquish the reins of the military.

  On the eve of all this joy, though, a shadow had fallen over the city. A caravel had arrived a week ago, bearing on it a grim-faced set of ambassadors.

  The first was a dwarf from far-off Oryn Deeps, a subterranean mountain empire on Jamur
aa. Yawgmoth and his eugenicists had once sojourned among the diminutive folk, healing the black-cough that slew them. The dwarf ambassador was Prince Delsuum, son of a duo-centennial king. Delsuum was merely eighty, sinewy and clear eyed, and dressed in jewel-tone silks that most dwarves would have disdained as foppery. He was a suspicious and grasping prince, if Yawgmoth remembered.

  An elf priestess debarked just after Prince Delsuum. She was Elyssendril Lademmdrith of the Daelic elves. She represented the vast confederation of woodland nations in the Domains. Yawgmoth and his fellow exiles had wandered among those peoples as well, though he had never met this priestess. She had the angular severity of her kind—graceful and slim as a poniard and just as cold. Her clothes consisted of a cloth not so much woven as grown, in places as smooth as a palm frond and in others nappy like wool. The living staff she bore twined with ivy tendrils that proclaimed the domain of her deity, and she glared at the grand city as though it were a leprous carbuncle.

  There were others too—a pair of barbarians garbed in buckskin, with hats formed out of taxidermied game hens. A triumvirate of minotaurs followed next. The beast-men would make an even greater sensation on the city streets than the dwarf: jokes about thick-headed and lascivious bull-men were standard fare in the market squares of Halcyon. Even the other delegates gave them a wide berth. The next arrival—an elderly cat woman—fastidiously waited until a breeze had freshened the gangplank before she debarked. Once a warrior among her exotic breed, this woman was clearly now a matriarch, the self-proclaimed Queen of a Thousand Tribes. Last of all was a grizzled old lizard man from volcanic Shiv.

  Each new arrival was a rung lower on the chain of being, farther from Thran humanity. These beasts were throwbacks, burrowing among rocks and hugging trees, dressing in dead pelts. They were half animal. Their bodies were crude—built for violence. Their minds and societies were just the same. All had welcomed Yawgmoth when he and his comrades had arrived, human healers in their midst. All had repaid his labors with distrust and hatred. They had made the eugenicists most unwelcome, human freaks among their people. Now it was they who were the freaks.

  No sooner had the contingent debarked than they affronted the elders who greeted them. Spurning offers of friendship, the delegation demanded an immediate audience with the full assembled council. It was explained that council members were spread across the continent, and a council could not be convened in less than a week. Prince Delsuum indicated that a full council must be convened in no more than a week or the ambassadorial corps would leave, their message undelivered, “to the great peril of Halcyon.”

  That was that. Without indication as to why they had come, the ambassadors retired to state quarters to wait.

  The week passed. The temple’s dedication had come. The Feast of Victories was about to begin. The council convened to hear the news of the barbarian ambassadors.

  There was a festival air beneath the Council Hall dome. Halcyon’s elders wore bright robes of celebration. They brought with them loud conversation and laughter. For weeks, their eyes had been trained on this day and the Feast of Victories. Whatever niggling business had summoned them here, they would not be diverted long from civic celebration.

  Yawgmoth and Rebbec were among those garbed for festival. Rebbec wore a yellow robe streaming with embroidery and ribbons. Yawgmoth’s own robes were moon-gray. The shoulder piece of his robe was silver inset with a gleaming powerstone, meant to remind the city of the silver-garbed warriors he commanded.

  “What is this all about?” Rebbec asked him.

  Yawgmoth gave a carefree shrug. “Isn’t dwarf diplomacy an oxymoron?”

  Rebbec covered her mouth as she laughed. She paused, wringing her hands together.

  “Well, if stories are true, dwarves are at least straightforward. Perhaps he’ll get to the point and allow us to get to the dedication ceremony.”

  Yawgmoth clutched her hands, enfolding them in his own. “Don’t be nervous. Nothing can steal this day away from you.”

  “It isn’t my day.”

  “Well, then, nothing can steal this day away from your temple.”

  “It isn’t my temple.”

  “Look, here they come.”

  The stir on the Council Hall floor stilled as the barbarian delegates entered. They came through the main doors to the chamber. The minotaurs marched with a military snap to their hooves, as glossy as obsidian. Behind them strode Prince Delsuum, panoplied in the heraldry of Oryn Deeps. He glared beneath reddish brows and might have seemed majestic if not for his stature. He rose only to the rumps of his minotaur escort. Elyssendril Lademmdrith came afterward, regaled in silks of foliage motif. Barbarian humans and lizard men followed.

  The elders watched this odd procession with patient indulgence. Only the elders of Losanon and Wington stood at solemn attention as the ambassadors marched toward the podium at the center of the chamber.

  The voice of the moderator rose, “Come to order, Elder Council. Today we receive emissaries from abroad. Welcome them to our midst.”

  Applause rose like a gentle rain. The parade of delegates made their grim way to the podium. The minotaurs positioned themselves on three sides, and the lizard men on the forth. Meanwhile, Prince Delsuum climbed to the lectern. The steps were a bit much for him, and he waddled as he went.

  “I hope he can see over the lectern,” Yawgmoth said quietly to Rebbec.

  Prince Delsuum ascended and glared down at Yawgmoth, as though he had heard the comment. From a document tube hanging at his side, he produced and unrolled a sheet of parchment. His hands shook ever so slightly as he flattened it on the lectern.

  “The council may be seated,” the moderator said. With a rumble of benches and whisper of paper, the group sat.

  Prince Delsuum cleared his throat. The sound was channeled through the powerstones positioned around him, and it reverberated nervously beneath the dome.

  He read: “I, Prince Delsuum of the ruling house of Oryn Deeps, have been selected to speak for a coalition of the five great non-human races of the world—dwarf, elf, Viashino, minotaur, and cat person. We represent twenty-five nations and have found alliance also among the non-Thran humans of Jamuraa and the Thran humans of the Losanon and Wington city-states—”

  That announcement brought a stir of speculation to the Council Hall floor. Prince Delsuum looked up from the page, taking a moment to mop his brow.

  The moderator signaled for silence, and her enforcers tensed along the perimeter. The hush was immediate.

  Taking a deep breath, the dwarf prince resumed. “We come to you with a familiar story, a story of plague and civil war and massacre. Of course, there will always be plagues, but when before have plagues led to uprisings and wholesale slaughter? When except these last decades? And when before have plagues propelled a man to the height of a nation? Only when the man is a healer. Only when the man promises a cure. Only when he pretends control of a plague so that he can take control of a nation.

  “Such a man has come among us. Such a man used the black-cough of Oryn Deeps to spark a workers’ rebellion. He, his fellow exiles, and his rebels nearly slew my father, nearly destroyed a millennium of dwarf rule beneath the mountain, nearly made this singularly monstrous man a king among dwarves. Such a man turned the creeping mold of the Argoth Forests into a virulent plague that ate away the elves there. His agents abducted Priestess Elyssendril Lademmdrith and her healers, and he held the whole population ransom for the cure. Once the ransom was paid, he delivered only sweetened water and twelve slain healers. Such a man loosed the white death among Talruaan minotaurs, merely to study its effects. Such a man spread rabies among the ruling cat warriors of Jamuraa until they tore each other apart in a mad frenzy. Such a man poisoned the human tribes of Gulatto Meisha. Such a man captured and pithed and vivisected the bey of the Shivan Viashino.

  “We believed him and have paid dearly for our mistakes.
Now we call for the immediate extradition of this monster from Halcyon. In the name of the five great non-human species of Dominaria, and the non-Thran humans of Gulatto Meisha, and the Thran humans of Losanon and Wington, I demand the immediate extradition of the healer known as Yawgmoth.”

  The prickly silence that had accompanied the dwarf prince’s presentation now cracked like thunder. The whole of the assembly rose. Some shouted. Some shook their fists. Others only stood and gaped, mouths wide and breathless. The roar of protest—and agreement—shook the vast building.

  Rebbec’s eyebrows drew down in a stern line. “How dare they come here and make these accusations!”

  The moderator signaled for silence. “The prince retains the floor!”

  Enforcers wrestled the most obstreperous representatives from the hall. The rest hushed, though no one sat again.

  “He fooled us,” the dwarf prince said, no longer reading. “He is fooling you. This phthisis that plagues you—he has used it to ascend to the heights of your city. In just over six years, he has gone from being an exile to being a near king. He has taken over your army and created an army of his own. They are posted throughout the city-states of this empire. Only in Losanon and Wington has their power been checked. Elsewhere, Yawgmoth rules as he does here. He sends his critics down among the infirm. He liberates those who would serve him and eliminates the rest. He regulates distribution of the serum and infects any who oppose him. He has reshaped your city in his own image. We plead with you—look around. See the fruits of this man’s deeds. He is evil masked in good, disease masked in healing, domination masked in servitude. Stop him before he becomes ruler of all Halcyon, ruler of the whole Thran Empire. If he ascends that far, we will consider it a declaration of war—world war. If he is not given over to us, Halcyon will have to fight the rest of Dominaria.”

  There was no longer any hope of holding back the shouts. The moderator signaled impotently for silence. Elders surged from their seats into the aisles. Minotaurs stomped furiously, threatening to gore any who approached.