The Thran

by J. Robert King

  Another thunderous boom filled the chamber.

  “Yawgmoth is using my behemoths.” Glacian said. His face quivered in the gleam of the oil lantern Rebbec brought on her visits. “The bastard. He’s stolen every invention of mine…twisted it to his own ends.”

  Rebbec heaved a weary sigh beneath the scarf that draped her mouth. With a gloved hand, she patted his arm.

  “He’s only defending the city, the empire.”

  “He’s destroying them. He’s only defending himself.”

  “Your inventions are being put to good use.”

  Scabrous fingers clutched her gloved hand. He stared up from shredded skin and powdering bone, out of the heart of mad despair.

  “He’s climbed inside of me, Rebbec. He’s climbed inside all of us.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, pulling away.

  “My mind. Those stones he has. What he calls a cure. He implants those stones and can see into the minds of the people. Powerstones absorb the character of a person. I believe that now. They take on the qualities of strong people. He reads our minds. He’s put one of his stones in me too.” Glacian dragged back the blankets from the scar on his side. It was mounded and infected, stitches like black spiders straddling the cut. “He put a stone in here.”

  Rebbec shook her head grimly. “He took a powerstone out of you, he didn’t put one in. I watched him.”

  “He put one in. He uses it to ravage my mind. He takes my thoughts, my inventions, my dreams and twists them. How else did he find out about the behemoths?”

  “Behemoths are hard to hide,” Rebbec said. “Yawgmoth has complete control of the mana rig. It’s amazing he didn’t discover them sooner.”

  “The mana rig…yes, the mana rig…”

  “Listen. You lie here alone in the dark. Your mind is…is too brilliant to dwell in darkness. It’s no wonder you come up with these…beliefs about what is happening, but they aren’t true.”

  “You listen. I’ve been afraid to tell you this. I’ve been afraid even to think it. He’s listening all the time, but he can’t listen now, not while he’s fighting. So, I’ll tell you now. Don’t tell Yawgmoth. Don’t tell him what I am about to say.”

  Sighing in resignation, Rebbec said, “What is it this time?”

  “The Thran Temple. You can take the people away in the Thran Temple. Every stone in that temple is a plane unto itself. It’s not just a whole world. It is a whole Multiverse. You could live there forever. Our people could survive.”

  “Our people will survive. Yawgmoth will win this war. Even if he does not, there is Phyrexia.”

  “No! Whoever goes there is changed, is destroyed. You can save the rest. You can take them away in the Thran Temple.”

  “Take them away?”

  “A control stone. Create a control stone, just like the ones that move the sedan chairs. Create a control stone and mount it on the central altar of the temple, and you can fly it away from Halcyon, away from the war, from destruction.”

  Rebbec could only stare, mouth dropping open in amazement.

  “You can save our people, Rebbec. They can ascend, just as you have always hoped. You could take them to heaven, take them away from this hell.”

  A new light had entered Rebbec’s eyes, a blue and fragile light in the warm blanket of lamp glow.

  “You know it can be done. You know it must be done.”

  “I know it can be done,” Rebbec echoed distantly.

  “Don’t tell Yawgmoth.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t let him plant one of his stones in you.”

  “No.”

  “Promise me you’ll do it. Promise me you’ll make the control stone. Promise me you’ll take our people away from here.”

  “No.” Eyes distant in the black space, she stood, took a deep breath, and said, “I have to go. There is a battle being fought.”

  “Yes, go, Rebbec. Leave me, but save them. Save them!”

  * * *

  —

  By the second day, most of the reserves were spent. The freshest Halcyte troops were weary to the bone.

  Not so Commander Gix and his Phyrexian warriors. They fought on despite wounds that would kill mere humans.

  “Forward!”

  Phyrexians exploded from the entrenchments. Gix ran with them. They were a black and boiling mass. It seemed the old volcano was disgorging a bubbling tide of lava. Their armor was scaly. Their helms ended in barbed horns. The articulated joints of their shoulder, elbow, thigh, and knee plates made them seem inhuman monsters.

  “Isn’t that what we are?” the commander mused. It was merely an observation, not a condemnation. Yawgmoth had been right about everything. On a day long ago, he had forced Gix to accept the cure for the phthisis, the power that lay in that cure. Perhaps Gix had died that day—the old Gix—but a new man was born. A new monster.

  He charged at the head of that surging company of Phyrexians. Commander Gix held his head high, a head now a third larger than it had been. The change had begun shortly after his Phyrexian heart stone had been implanted. Even as his skin grew healthy again, his tangled locks of hair had fallen out. Beneath it, skin and skull both had grown outward. The change at first had frightened him, but a voice within assured there was nothing to fear. Skin and skull grew to allow his brain to grow as well. A newfound clarity of thought seemed to confirm this belief. Suddenly, the whole insane world had come clear to him. Even as his skull had settled into its current, striated form, his mind had settled his devotion to Yawgmoth, his glimpse of the master’s vision, his delight in his work.

  That simple clarity of purpose impelled his pickax cleanly into the head of a dwarf. The little barbarian trembled for a moment on the pick. It had punched through the top of the thing’s head like a snake’s fang into an egg. The tip must have been lodged in the dwarf’s spine to make it shudder like that. Gix lifted the pick, and the barbarian came up with it. No matter. Gix’s arms were longer and stronger than they had been. With their bulging sheen and the thick stalks of hair that jutted from them, they seemed almost the legs of a giant fly. Midstride, Gix gave the pickax a shake. Limp and bloody, the dwarf flopped stupidly off it. Gix impatiently spun the haft and brought the ax down to kill another dwarf.

  “Just like harvesting mushrooms!” he shouted above the clamor.

  Smiles went up along the line of Phyrexians—smiles where there were teeth and lips capable of drawing back from them. Some showed their appreciation only by poking their picks into more dwarf heads. Just like mushrooms—soft and white, with that satisfying little thup when the spike penetrated the cap.

  Then there were no more dwarves. They lay in messy ruin behind them. Blood came from one end and a similar substance from the other. Barbaric. They couldn’t even die well, these little mushroom men. The human warriors beyond at least provided more sport. They yelled and scuttled, landed a few swings, dodged a bit better. They were more like the albino cockroaches in the deep caverns—hard to catch, hard to kill, but not particularly dangerous. The way to kill cockroaches, at least ones you weren’t planning on eating, was simply to squash them.

  Gix swung his body-laden pickax with one arm, bashing two humans to the ground. He wielded his dagger with the other hand. A slash toward the mouth was always good with a dagger. That way, if the foe tried to duck, he would get his eyes sliced open like a pair of grapes. Gix was strong enough to do that—a slice entering one temple, severing the nasal bones, and exiting the other temple. If the foe tried to leap, he would get his throat cut. If the foe came straight on—as in the current case—Gix’s blade cut the man’s mouth open from ear to ear. It wouldn’t be a debilitating injury for a truly warlike race, but humans were amazingly unwilling to fight on just because their jaws hung limp beneath severed muscles. This warrior, for instance—look at his bloody smile and the lower lip
quivering across his voice box. See how he falls to his knees and buries what used to be a face in his hands? If a Phyrexian were cut like that, he’d continue to fight on, wearing a permanent grin.

  Commander Gix battled onward, admiring the warriors with him. They were beautiful—large heads, wide eyes, ridged noses, tusks, chin horns, pointed ears—and they fought beautifully. One woman sank tigerlike claws into a human’s breast and ripped its torso wide open. One man, who had lost his sword hand, stabbed with the sliced ends of his own radius and ulna bones. One child—he must have been no more than ten when implanted—leapt agilely from shoulder to shoulder, biting chunks out of heads as though he were biting apples. Beautiful! Yawgmoth had done more to transform the Thran race than anyone before him. It was as though humanity had been only the pupae form—soft and weak and ugly—of this new species of creatures.

  The humans soon were eaten through as well. Gix and his band of Phyrexians had slain thousands, losing perhaps ten of their own. A hundred-to-one kill ratio. Truly these creatures were no more than pupae.

  “Forward,” Gix shouted. “To the defile!”

  * * *

  —

  A third day dawned on the Thran-Phyrexian War.

  In the city, the sounds of battle were drowned beneath the cheers of the people. They lined the eastward walls, crowding every elevation that gave a view of the battlefield below. They filled every balcony and overlook of the Thran Temple. Crystals sent their images outward in minute rainbows. It was as though the gods themselves stared avidly at the battle below.

  Yet, these gods saw nothing truly. They saw all from a distance. They saw Phyrexian strength and success without seeing Phyrexian grotesquerie and savagery. For the citizens of Halcyon, the war had become a faraway spectacle, a carnival in the literal sense—a feast of flesh.

  The crowd watched with hushed apprehension. Whenever a Thran ship went down—whether by ray cannon blast or raking light from the mirror arrays—the crowd cheered. Each new surprise of Yawgmoth’s brought more hurrahs. Sand-crabs, hidden armies, behemoths, Phyrexian warriors; each brought shouts of hope, cheers, even laughter from the Halcytes.

  The sound echoed mockingly in Rebbec’s ears.

  She stood at the highest point of the Thran Temple. This parapet was not open to the public, was in fact not even part of the original design. It had been added to allow the builders easier access to the matrix of powerstones that made up the temple’s roof. Now Rebbec stood here, alone, watching the bloody viciousness unfold.

  The Halcyte fleet had already downed more than two hundred of the enemy caravels, which lay in smoldering ruins across the desert floor. Many of these ships had imploded on impact. Their powerstone cores cracked, sucking in matter to fill the void. In this case, matter meant meat—human, dwarf, elf, minotaur, Viashino. How many thousands had been sucked away into nothingness, not even their bodies left to litter the desert? Thousands more did litter the ground. Even from this great height, more than fifteen hundred feet above the desert floor, those bodies and the dark spreading stains from heads and bellies were unmistakable. Most were Thran. Many were Halcytes. A few were even Phyrexians. It didn’t seem to matter how many fell. Yawgmoth’s war machine rolled onward, grinding bones to meal.

  A feast of flesh. The crowd gobbled it up. Rebbec overheard folk pledge to join the Phyrexian ranks. They saw Phyrexian power and prowess, not Phyrexian mutation. No one wanted to be left behind. All wanted to be improved by Yawgmoth, elevated by him.

  The temple’s tangled spectra suddenly were suffused by a huge glare. Something vast moved among the distant folds of mountain. It gleamed like a diamond and rolled like quicksilver. It was enormous. A ball of quintessence? No, a ball of metal. It did not roll but floated among the peaks, heading straight for the battle.

  “What are you doing, Yawgmoth?” Rebbec wondered. She blinked, at last making out the strange thing she saw. “The Null Sphere!”

  She had helped Glacian design the enormous broadcast station. Rebbec herself had innovated the light metal beams, but she had never intended it to fly. It was to stay rooted to the ground, drawing power from it and channeling it out to every artifact creature in the empire….

  “Oh, no!”

  Even from this height, the carnage was plain. As the Null Sphere rose moonlike over the battlefield, the tide of Thran artifact engines turned. No longer beating back Phyrexians, the Thran machines joined them and attacked their own forces.

  Thran bled and died and were trampled into the earth. Those who yet lived retreated in terror toward Megheddon Defile. It would give them no escape, of course. Yawgmoth permitted no escape.

  A cheer rose from crowd within the temple. “Victory! Victory! Victory!”

  The battle soon would be finished. The Thran would be finished as well. They were in full rout below, running back toward distant Phoenon. Even the remaining Thran war caravels were fleeing before the Halcyte fleet. The Null Sphere hovered balefully above it all.

  Something dropped from the belly of that huge sphere, falling into the center of Megheddon Defile, into the center of the retreating army.

  For a moment more, the valley stood there, a crooked wound that cut away into rankling mountains. Then the walls of the defile leapt upward. Something milky white oozed from the center of that wound and flooded both directions down its length. The whiteness overflowed the cliff edges of the defile and seeped out and down adjacent valleys and crevices. It poured from the mouth of the defile onto the desert floor. Pearly clouds engulfed the rearguard of the Thran and rolled on toward running Phyrexian troops. The white wave overtook many of them, sweeping them under an opaque cloud.

  At last, the milky flood paused, lingering in a malignant semicircle across the center of the desert.

  All talk in the temple had gone silent. Only battle sounds came. In the final lip of sound before the blast was heard, there came a faint and ubiquitous scream.

  The roaring boom shook the temple as though it were a glass wind chime. Noise pounded every breastbone. Every citizen went to his or her knees. None was left standing.

  Even as Rebbec fell, she knew this was Yawgmoth’s stone-charger. This was the weapon he had worked so hard to perfect. The device merely charged a powerstone by sucking the life from the land all around it. In a single stroke, Yawgmoth had slain the entire Thran army.

  * * *

  —

  “Take the sphere higher,” Yawgmoth ordered his artificer crew in the command core. “Away from that killing cloud!”

  The huge bulk of the Null Sphere lurched upward. Phyrexians, Halcytes, and artificers steadied themselves.

  “Redirect the sphere’s mana pumps. Draw mana from that cloud. It is pure energy. Draw it away, before it destroys everything!”

  One of the artificers asked, “What shall we do with that much raw power? It will overload the mana batteries.”

  “Send it out. Send it to every Thran artifact engine in the empire. Shut them down.”

  Even for the old man, this was too much. “Lives will be lost—thousands of innocent civilians who rely on artifact engines—miners and loggers and fishers—”

  “Do it, and be glad I do not ask you to turn those machines against their owners.” Yawgmoth’s mood seemed to soften. “It is only temporary, only until the Thran Alliance sues for peace and recognizes me as the true emperor. Then, all the devices will be reactivated. Then I will have a much greater use for this mana energy. My artificers will rig a channel by which mana power can be shunted from Dominaria directly into Phyrexia. They will draw off killing clouds from the world above and use them to build my world below.”

  “For-forgive my interruption, Lord Yawgmoth,” the old man said. “But I have grave news.”

  “What is it?”

  Fingers rushing across the powerstones in the arms of his command chair, the artificer said, “Our new altitude has give
n us greater range for visual scan. I’ve just now picked them up, perhaps a hundred miles out, approaching from the west.”

  “Picked what up?”

  “Two more fleets of Thran ships—two more invading armies.”

  No one survived within the milky, killing cloud. It lingered a whole day before being drawn off by the lofty Null Sphere. There were not even skeletons left, not plate armor or ring mail, not the silver suits of Halcyte guards. The cloud had scoured away the fallen behemoths, disintegrated the ruined caravels, and even eaten the dust of the desert and the sand beneath it and the bedrock too, down to thirty feet. The narrow Megheddon Defile had widened into a broad vale, hollowed out of the rock as if by acid.

  Phyrexian ships hovered in stupefaction above that eerie cloud. Then, new orders came: “Land on the desert amid the troops. Take on board as many as you can. Fly them to the city. Resupply and recharge. Prepare to engage.”

  Engage what? Engage whom?

  Beyond shimmering Halcyon, black clouds boiled up from the west—except that they weren’t clouds. They were more Thran ships. Two more fleets, and in their shadow marched two great armies. They approached across the searing, waterless desert.

  * * *

  —

  “Citizens of Halcyon. You have seen a mighty battle. You have seen the traitors and invaders—the so-called Thran Alliance—fall to the armies of right. You have seen the Halcyte guard fight with valor that has not been equaled in centuries and had not been surpassed even then. You have seen the Phyrexian guard fight as angels among mortals—with the pure, vengeful joy that comes from righteousness. You have seen the wonder of the stone-charger in the defile, cleansing our foes in a cloud of white. All of it you beheld from the walls and rooftops and even from this very temple where I stand now.

  “I ask you to become what you have seen. Let the valor of the Halcyte guard enter through your eyes and sink down into your heart and become valor there too. Let the righteous vengeance of the Phyrexian guard heat your blood so that you will not shrink from the coming fight but yearn for it. Let the white cloud that cleansed the very ground of the Thran army now cleanse each of your souls of whatever rebel impulses might remain among them.