“Wait,” Eldest Jameth called out. “At least tell us the name of this place.”
“Call it what you want,” the planeswalker said simply. Just before winking from existence, she added, “The natives of this world call it Mercadia.”
* * *
—
It had been a hellish descent. The rioters had destroyed Dungas’s elevator. Glacian descended the old-fashioned way—borne down the switchback path by a passel of goblins. Before and behind his pallet, health corps workers marched with swords and lanterns. Twice the bellows ceased their work, and the crew lowered Glacian to the path to effect repair. Each time, he fell unconscious before the mechanism could be repaired. Each time he awoke to tepid lantern light on jagged cave stone overhead.
At last, the descent was done. The path leveled and widened. Cold cave air gave over to the warm, stale scent of human breath in confined spaces. Led by the health corps, the goblins proceeded down a winding passage, past a series of side caves, and to the quarantine cave at their base. They shuffled beneath the archway and into a broad cavern.
Glacian had expected the stench of rotting flesh. What he smelled was somehow worse, the harsh stink of cleansers.
The quarantine cave had been transformed since Yawgmoth’s ascendance. Lanterns glowed throughout the vast chamber, its walls and floor scrubbed and polished until all filth was removed. The old shelves had been torn down, replaced by orderly stacks of whitewashed cells. They seemed almost white coffins, in which the ill could reside in complete isolation from powerstone radiation and cross-contamination. Each sarcophagus had a number, each a set of charts. White-garbed and masked health corps workers moved on catwalks among the racks of coffins.
Previously, the patients had been plague victims in quarantine. Now they were test subjects. The cleanness, the privacy, the attentive healers—these changes were not meant to assure comfort or decency or healing. They were meant to assure reliable results.
The goblins carried the pallet to the center of the complex. A white-suited man waited with a new set of charts.
“Hello, Glacian. Welcome to the quarantine caves of Halcyon. I received your write-up this morning. I’ve prepared an especially large healing capsule to accommodate your…apparatuses.”
Lolling weakly on the pallet, Glacian barely managed to bring his head around and see the man who spoke to him.
“Not you,” he gabbled. “Not Gix.”
Rebbec descended toward the fifth aerial gate of Halcyon. She had designed it, a great eye-shaped passage with wide ramps rising from either side. A progression of shallow steps led up from the center. Each tread was wide enough to hold fifty dock workers abreast, each deep enough to allow three strides before the next rise.
The gate had been a fine design, but now it was being destroyed. Halcyte guards swarmed it, and in their midst—Yawgmoth.
The Lord of Halcyon stood atop the limestone arch. His robes of state were flung out on the wind. He watched workers haul steel cables through groaning pulleys. They struggled to hoist a brassy ray cannon atop the wall. This vast gun had cost the city a small fortune, and Yawgmoth had installed nine at each of the five gates. The weapons had come from Glacian’s old sketchbooks, and Yawgmoth boasted that one of these could sink airships miles away. He had assured the city that these guns would make the city secure in case of invasion, and he had even offset the cost by shipping more such weapons, at a considerable markup, to the other four loyal city-states.
“A necessity…a necessity,” Rebbec groused as she strode up the spiral inner stair to the peak of the gateway. “Nothing ugly is a necessity.” It was one of her many credos belied by the last few years.
Rebbec reached the top of the arch. Yawgmoth stood close by. He smiled to see her—not her, but the ray cannon that settled onto the limestone wall before her. As the cables eased, Yawgmoth knelt beside the gleaming casing, running his fingers tenderly across it.
“Beautiful,” he whispered excitedly. “I can’t imagine anything more beautiful.”
“How about a gate that isn’t bristling with guns?” Rebbec asked, hands on her hips.
Yawgmoth looked up at her, dark amid the halo of her distant temple. “Hello, Rebbec. I can imagine one thing more beautiful than these—”
“What’s next? Catapults on the council dome? Flamethrowers on the temple?”
He continued buffing the gun. His face reflected in distorted angles from its casing. “If you had designed these sites for defense as well as beauty, retrofits would not be necessary.”
“Nothing ugly is necessary.”
Yawgmoth stood, his features grave. He towered over the gun, the architect, over the whole lower city.
“You are wrong about that, Rebbec. Ugliness is necessary. We Thran weren’t drawn upward by visions of beauty. We were impelled from below by ugliness. Craven lust, violent depravity—these drove us up into the light. The empire was forged in war, not peace. It rose from struggle, and another struggle is coming—an ugly, violent war that will drive us into divinity.”
Rebbec stared into his eyes. That act alone was an exertion of will. His powerful figure was the black incarnation of all those animalistic forces he described. He was brutal and beautiful at once, apostate of all she once believed.
“Civil war, burning ships, fields of dead—is it worth it?”
He blinked, withdrawing for a moment into interior spaces. “I rose from lepers and plague victims to rule the empire. Glacian descended from glories into decay. Peace brings phthisis—progressive degeneration. War brings phyresis—progressive generation. That’s how we’ll rise, Rebbec—impelled from below.”
Rebbec shook her head, turning away.
Yawgmoth wrapped a powerful arm around her. “Your husband progresses well, I understand.”
Mention of Glacian sent spiders of guilt creeping across Rebbec’s scalp. She pulled away from him.
“It is quite a regimen you have him on. Skin grafts, needles in nerves, alcohol baths, leeches, plasters—”
“Health through struggle. We’re approaching a final cure. Most of the patients are responding well. Even your husband, despite himself.”
“He is in agony!”
“Of course. Without you…”
The air beside them shimmered with a sudden presence. The figure took form out of the clear sky. Dyfed suddenly stood there.
“Am I interrupting something?” she asked, a smile quirking her lips.
Yawgmoth turned toward Dyfed, an avid look in his eyes. “Have you found it?”
The woman’s smile only deepened. “Yes. Would you like to come see?”
“Is it perfect?” Yawgmoth asked excitedly.
“Nine separate spheres, each with a unique ecology.”
“Is it extensive?”
“The land space is as large as your empire was, before the rebellion—and with work it can be twice that or thrice that.”
“Is it…beautiful?”
Dyfed’s crossed her arms over her chest and canted her hips. “Do you want to come see it or not?”
“What’s this about?” interrupted Rebbec.
Yawgmoth’s eyes were feverish. “You spoke of ugliness—but let me show you what it all will be for.” He extended his hand to her.
Rebbec wanted to refuse, but she could not—not anymore.
No sooner had her hand settled in his powerful grasp than Yawgmoth turned and grasped Dyfed’s hand.
“Take us there. Take us to paradise.”
Without so much as a twitch of her eyes, Dyfed whisked them away through the racing distances. Her touch on Yawgmoth sent a glimmering envelope of power around him. It spread from his hand to Rebbec.
Terror filled her. She could not move, could not even gasp a breath. Across her skin, she felt the violent plucking of the space between worlds. It was as though locusts swa
rmed her, mandibles tearing at the mana membrane.
Then the chaos was gone. Dyfed stepped from the Blind Eternities and into a wide, green, and beautiful world.
The trio stood on a rocky outcrop. Below them lay a primeval forest, with tree trunks twenty feet wide and hundreds of feet tall. The tousled tops of ferns and cypress breathed easily in the blue winds of the place. A single broad channel broke the treetops, a massive and meandering river far below. Water moved, smooth and black, beneath the thick canopy, here and there reflecting scraps of sunlight on the fronds. Huge serpents coiled about stout boughs. The shriek of strange birds filled the air. Beyond the forest spread a verdant grassland. It reached a long, low rumple of gray mountains in the distance.
“It’s beautiful,” Rebbec found herself gasping.
Dyfed watched her, grinning. “More than beautiful. Bountiful and immense. Every Thran citizen—even the rebels and children—could be granted a thousand acres, and still the empire would own half the land. This is an uninhabited world—the smartest creature here has a brain the size of a chestnut. It is wide open for colonization.”
“No war, no disease…” Rebbec said. “You have doubled the size of the empire without a single death.”
Yawgmoth drew in a deep breath of fertile air. “First, I will bring all those with the phthisis here, away from powerstones and their killing auras.” He looked fondly at Rebbec and drew her toward him. “I want you to design a new infirmary for that hillside there, above the river and just beyond the forest eaves. I want you to design a facility that will allow for our aggressive healing strategies but also provide the patients sunlight, fresh air, beautiful views….”
She stared into his eyes as though into a sunrise. “Oh, Yawgmoth. It would heal them. I know it would. Just to be out of that cave would heal them. To be far away from the powerstones and to be out beneath the sun.”
“I want the infirmary to do more than heal them. I want it to perfect them, Rebbec. I want it to strengthen them, cure them of mortality.”
Doubt darkened Rebbec’s eyes. “You want it to do what?”
A quizzical look filled his face. “You’re the one who created the architecture of ascension. You’re the one who designed a temple that could be entered only by leaving the world.”
“Yes, but all that is about aspiring to divinity, being molded after its beauty and perfection—being shaped by it but not becoming it. Can we truly make ourselves gods?”
Dyfed laughed. “It is easily enough done.”
She strode toward the other two, gripped their hands, and then stepped from the rocky ridge where they had stood. The dimensions closed in around them like a flower caught suddenly by nightfall. When it opened again, they stood in a very different place.
Instead of a blue and over-spreading sky, there was a lofty ceiling of graceful metal beams. Gigantic rivets and bolts in the fan vault formed regular constellations. Pillars many miles high connected the ceiling to the floor. At the base of these opened silvery smokestacks, though no soot issued from them. A mirror-bright floor stretched at their feet. It reflected the distant ceiling. This was a world of silver and steel, without hint of tarnish or rust. Without sun or moon or stars, the metallic world was lit only by the infinitely reflected glow of the metal itself.
Rebbec muttered. “What is this place? Where are we?”
“This is the same world,” Dyfed said, “but a different sphere. The first sphere, where we stood before, lies on the outside. This second sphere is nested in the first. These are what your poets of old called the foundations of the world.”
Rebbec pointed toward the ceiling. “The world we just left…it is up there?”
Dyfed merely nodded.
“These…immense columns…the fan vaults above…they support the weight of a world?” gabbled Rebbec.
“Yes,” Dyfed said.
Rebbec slumped, faint, against Yawgmoth.
He smiled brightly. “She is an architect. She knows the load equations, knows what it would take to construct a world like this.”
Rebbec whispered, “The foundations of the world…”
“In more ways than one,” Dyfed responded. “Not only do these columns uphold that world above, but this sphere of metal is the origin of everything you see above.”
Rebbec shook her head. “How can this place have given birth to that place? There is no food, no water, no sunlight. Nothing could live here.”
Dyfed pointed outward along the mirror floor.
In the dim light, something moved, many somethings. The creatures themselves were composed of polished metal, and they scuttled in a broad ant swarm. Some had the configuration of ants. Others were centipedal. More still had spidery designs or figures unlike any biological creature. They approached the three invaders with something like hunger.
“What are they?” Rebbec asked.
“Prototypes. Experiments. You might consider them highly advanced machines or nascent creatures. They were devised here. This is a laboratory of sorts, one devoid of the contamination of biological life. These creatures are mechanisms, yes. But later models—better models—became the serpents in the world above.”
“They were mechanisms?” Rebbec asked. “They were machines?”
“Living machines,” Dyfed corrected. “They breathe. They eat. They reproduce. They evolve. They die. Just because their origins are in artifice rather than biology does not mean they are not alive. Though metallic, their flesh and the foliage of the plants they eat could nourish you, Rebbec, and you—in turn—could nourish them.”
Yawgmoth’s smile only deepened. “You’ve found us not only a primeval empire. You’ve found us a storehouse of inventions. Won’t Glacian be happy, Rebbec?”
“Not if we get eaten,” she said nervously as the metal beasts converged on them.
Dyfed reached for her companions. Even as she laid hold of them, the gigantic insects arrived. Antennae sparked with power, claws swept inward, mandibles clamped on necks—necks that had faded from being.
The three tumbled through the spaces between worlds and then arrived in a world even stranger than the last two.
It was a labyrinth of pipes. Some were miles wide. Others were as wide as Rebbec’s fingers. They coiled and twisted through the dark distances of that sphere. Many glowed with internal heat, as though they conveyed magma. A few oozed tarry liquids. A coil of purple ceramic pipe gurgled with descending oceans. It was a noisy space—huge and forbidding.
“It is the same world, but a sphere deeper,” Rebbec said.
“You’re catching on,” Dyfed said. “Here all of the elements of the other planes are routed and channeled. It is the vast mechanism that replicates the workings of a natural world.”
Rebbec’s panting slowed. She stared in dull realization. “If this world is all artifice…who is its creator?” She looked up at Dyfed. “You?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Though I thank you for the compliment. No. This place was created by an ancient and powerful planeswalker. It was his life’s work.”
“Then how can you just give it away?” she asked. “If this isn’t yours, if it is the magnum opus of some ancient planeswalker, how can you simply cede it to the empire?”
“Shall I show you?” Dyfed asked, grasping Rebbec’s hand and reaching for Yawgmoth’s.
He withdrew his grip. “First show us the rest. You’d said there were nine spheres here, nested one within the others.”
“Yes, one for each city-state and one for Yawgmoth.”
“Then let’s see the rest.”
“They get darker from here on out—the next one is the furnace level, with mile-high incinerators not working right now. There are massive refinery stacks and metal mills. Then there’s the fifth sphere, just a sea of oil. There’s one down there that is hotter than a sun. Not very welcoming,” she said, then sna
tched up his hand. “But the ninth sphere—”
This time, the ragged blackness between worlds was not as terrifying as the place they stepped into.
It was utterly dark and still. The air stank of rotting flesh. Even in the choking murk, Rebbec could sense that this sphere was very small—only as large as Yawgmoth’s laboratory in the infirmary. With the soft ooze beneath her feet, she knew that most of the sphere was filled with the corpse of whatever had dwelt here.
“This is welcoming?” Rebbec gasped out, clutching a hand over her mouth.
“In a way, yes,” Dyfed responded. “The master of this place died a month ago. It will slowly die after him. Unless, of course, the world welcomes us to take the master’s place.” She awakened a light above her outstretched hand. The glow splashed across the great carcass.
“A dragon,” Rebbec gasped out. She stood on the creature’s decaying hip. Desiccated scales curled like autumn leaves around her feet. Beneath it, putrid meat clung to slumped bones. She looked for clear ground on which to stand, but the dead dragon took up the whole sphere. “A dragon made this all?”
From where she stood, atop the leathery wreck of one wing, Dyfed said, “Yes. A dragon was his favorite form. It is why the first sphere is filled with serpents—made in his own image. But in truth, his original figure was human.” She waved her hand.
There, in the putrid air between them, a ghostly face formed—the vision of a man. He seemed an elderly Glacian, his fine features wreathed in a white beard and shocks of hair.
“From here he could control the whole plane?” Yawgmoth asked intently.
“Yes,” Dyfed answered.
“If we cleared his corpse away, I could control it from here?” he persisted.
“Yes. Eight spheres for the city-states and the ninth sphere for Yawgmoth.”
“If you link this plane to a powerstone, you can use it to create a permanent portal from Halcyon?”
“That is the plan,” Dyfed affirmed.
The Thran Page 20