A chill clotted Rebbec’s spine. She drew back the edge of Glacian’s infirmary garment. Folds slid away from a gaunt hipbone, translucent skin showing the shrunken muscle beneath. Glacian’s emaciation was awful. Rebbec cringed, tears coming to her eyes. Even so, she pulled back the gown.
“Gods, no.”
The cut Yawgmoth had made in her husband’s side had never healed. Black stitches straddled the gash. The flesh was dark and desiccated. Beneath lurked a malignant mound. It looked to be a tumor, the size of two fists clutched together.
“He didn’t. He couldn’t have…” she muttered, touching the spot. It was hard as rock. “Oh, gods, no! He did! He did!”
“He did what?”
Rebbec whirled, withdrawing her hands. There, in the quarantine cave, Yawgmoth and his health corps monsters stood.
“He did what?” asked Yawgmoth, voice dripping with concern.
She stared into his eyes, wondering if he could see how much she hated and feared him. “He…he fell into a coma. He…he left me before…before I could say good-bye.”
Yawgmoth reached her. He wore his white robes of state, the exact hue of the casket where Glacian lay.
“We can heal him, Rebbec. You know that. We can heal anything.” He lifted his hand to draw back the strands of hair that had fallen into her face.
Rebbec shook her head vehemently. “No. No. Glacian wouldn’t have wanted it. It’s the one thing he would not have tolerated.”
Yawgmoth’s hand flashed out. An odd ring gleamed on his finger. He grasped her arm insistently. There was a jab, like the sting of a bee, and then a welling, burning ache.
Rebbec looked down, a protest tumbling from her mouth.
Already Yawgmoth was speaking. “—weary. Exhausted. You have been the good wife all these years. You’d even allow him to die rather than disobey him. I cannot allow it. You’re too weary. Nothing makes sense anymore. Everything true suddenly seems a lie. Every lie is playing at truth. You can’t let your husband die just because you aren’t thinking clearly—”
That much was true—she wasn’t thinking clearly. She couldn’t seem to remember what she had been doing today or the last few days. She was weary, bone weary. Exhaustion warmed her. Yawgmoth was right. She wasn’t thinking clearly.
Yawgmoth stood, lifting Rebbec. He carried her as though she were a lost lamb and he the good shepherd.
“—I’m going to help you and your husband. I’m going to take you both to Phyrexia and heal you, once and for all.”
Rebbec was only vaguely aware of the cave around her. Health corps workers surrounded and lifted Glacian’s healing capsule. Goblins chittered at them and crowded about. She was only vaguely aware of anything but Yawgmoth.
He was so strong, so warm, so caring and truth-speaking and godlike. In his arms, nothing could ever harm her again. He was even gentle with the goblins. He was even patient as he waded through their pawing mob.
“It’s all right, little ones. I’m not going to hurt her. I’m going to heal her.”
The little beasts were pulled aside by health corps workers.
One goblin, an old goblin, shouted out after Yawgmoth. “We light a lantern for you, Rebbec. We light a lantern for you!”
Yawgmoth smiled like the dawning sun. “Listen how they love you, Rebbec. They will light a candle for you. They will pray their little goblin prayers. Even the little monsters love you. I cannot blame them. I love you too.”
Rebbec could not imagine greater bliss, except to sleep now in his arms.
“That’s right. Sleep. I will heal you, Rebbec. Once and for all.”
Rebbec dreamed a strange dream.
She stood beside Yawgmoth on the first sphere of Phyrexia. They gazed out from a low rill of black stone. The grasslands below, from the mountains to the forest, were covered with a huge…thing. It seemed a fungus: brown-white fleshiness, sloping shelves, clustered stalks, opaquely bright, softly solid. The thing smelled of death and dirt but also of life and renewal.
“What is it?” Rebbec asked Yawgmoth in her dream. “What has grown up here in your world?”
His look was incredulous. He gazed at Rebbec with such amazed joy he seemed a young sun god.
“You don’t know? Don’t you recognize it?”
In fact, she didn’t. It was clearly a Phyrexian plant. Its amorphous domes had the same contour as the low-lying mountains. Its stalks were as aggressive and alien as the compacted forest below. Its roots were swollen and sunk into the ground, exactly as Rebbec would have designed pilings for a foundation….
“The infirmary?” Rebbec said breathlessly. It was her design, yes, but it had grown. It proliferated like fungus. Rooftops had become dome after dome in a vast field. Stacked sickrooms had spread in colony after colony. Footings had become literal roots, drawing power from the land. The building she had designed could have held a thousand patients. The building that now spread before her could hold hundreds of thousands. “My infirmary?”
“Phyresis,” Yawgmoth replied gently, wrapping his arm about her shoulder. “Progressive generation. Everything planted here grows. It changes, evolves, improves. It becomes larger, more powerful. It transcends its beginnings. The land transforms things. The land, the power of the Null Sphere, and the god within the land. This colony is large enough to hold all Halcytes. More colonies are growing, enough to hold all the empire, all the world.”
It was a strange dream. Rebbec felt certain it was a dream. In the half-logic of sleep, she could not tell whether the dream were hers or Yawgmoth’s.
“Even now, I’ve issued them an ultimatum, Rebbec. Even now, their commanders in their night encampments on the desert are reading my invitation. If they but surrender to me—unconditionally—they will be invited to join us here, in paradise.”
Rebbec drew a deep breath of the fertile air. “And if they do not surrender?”
He reached out, enfolding her in his warm cloak. The embrace was loving and protecting.
“An ultimatum must have teeth in it.”
Within his robe, the strong, salty scent of him was omnipresent. It was the scent of Phyrexia, distilled to its essence. Breathing that scent infused Rebbec. She clung to him as a child to a powerful savior. He was warm and certain and strong. Within his cloak, all remained as it had been. Beyond it, in the tumbling senselessness of dream, the whole world transformed.
When he drew back his cloak, the low mountains were gone, and the vast field, and the wooded cleft. Now they stood in a vaulted temple of iron strut and steel cable. Slim metal columns rose to a fan vault of delicate metal tracery. Where bosses might have adorned a Dominarian temple, here were clusters of bolts. Instead of wooden carvings, massive hammer beams gleamed with rivets. The floor was mirror-bright.
Across that floor, in regular rank and file, stood artifact armies. As shiny as the world they occupied, these creatures of steel and glass and powerstone gleamed coldly. Most were man-size, with arrays of articulated legs, compound eyes, segmented thoraxes. Others were mammoths in metal. They were built to plod, massive and unstoppable, through enemy ranks. Turrets of ray weapons perched upon their armored backs. In the distance, half-formed, were a few on the massive scale of the behemoths lost in the first day of fighting. Hunched and vicious, the hulls waited in vast immobility as crews of artificers swarmed them. The artificers seemed maggots working over the empty husks. On Phyrexia, though, maggots did not decompose bodies but composed them. In the far distance, a large factory stood. Lever arms labored against the horizon, sparks leapt from welding arcs, cascades of molten metal flowed into vast forms.
“This?” Rebbec asked. “This is your ultimatum? This is what will happen if they do not surrender?”
Yawgmoth smiled with quiet pride. “This is one result. The siege armies will face these forces and my Phyrexian guard in a land battle the likes of which has never been fo
ught on Dominaria. I will slay only so long as they resist. These forces will give them the chance to repent their perverse war. With them, I can force an unconditional surrender and bring those who survive back into the fold among the rest of us. With these forces and the Null Sphere, I can rule all eight city-states. There need never be civil war again.”
It was Yawgmoth’s dream. Rebbec knew that now. But how could she be dreaming Yawgmoth’s dream?
“You speak as though there is a worse option.”
Yawgmoth shrugged noncommittally. “If they rebuff my offer…”
Again the robe enfolded her. The spaces danced away. It was a sensation like traveling with Dyfed. Rebbec had the sudden realization that at least here, at least within Phyrexia, Yawgmoth had the power of a planeswalker.
The cloak opened to reveal the center of that steaming, hissing, thundering mill they had distantly seen. Machines towered. Smokestacks spewed. Cranes darted. Conveyors ground along. All among them, artificers moved. The gargantuan equipment made them seem only scuttling goblins. Phyrexia transformed them. It perfected them for their tasks. Skin grew rumpled and tough. Eyes grew wide in the perpetual murk. There was not an ounce of fat on them. Their work suits hung on lean, hungry muscles.
Artificers and machines were not the most amazing sight. In their midst stood nine exquisite creations. They towered in a circle around Yawgmoth and Rebbec, their shiny fuselages reflecting back the attenuated images of the two.
“Stone-chargers,” Rebbec said grimly.
“Yes. If they refuse my offer outright, not one of them will survive. The armies will be wiped out utterly. Nine more are being completed even now—one for each city-state beyond our own, and two for discretionary use. The city states will each be given the chance to surrender, or be annihilated. Once the whole empire is fully in hand, there will be more bombs for every nation of the world. Once the world is mine, the Thran empire will expand to take over the whole Multiverse.”
Rebbec’s heart flailed like a dying thing. She wished she could awaken from this dream. “How can we hope to conquer the Multiverse? We aren’t planeswalkers.”
“Oh, but we will be, my dear,” Yawgmoth responded with certainty. “We will be.” He flung his cloak about her.
For the first time, she resented it. For the first time, she felt the tingling ache of the transit from sphere to sphere. It was as though she had been numbed by a drug that slowly wore off. Even as the spheres cycled around them, she knew this was no dream. This was the all-too-true state of Phyrexia.
The cloak withdrew to reveal the most horrific sight so far. On this crimson sphere, lit by mile-high furnaces belching vast coronas of flame, the ground was lined with gigantic vats. Like furrows on a farm, they spread across the hills. Within each lurked a tormented soul, immersed in golden oil. Some vats held lifeless creatures, seemingly pickled. Others boiled with the thrashing agony of the animal within. Vat priests in their red vestments walked along catwalks above the vats. At intervals, they thrust powerstone rods down into them. Creatures that had been still leapt into sudden motion.
“They are called priests,” Yawgmoth said. “But really, they are mere farmers. They are raising crops of new creatures. They are raising Phyrexians.”
Rebbec could not even speak. She merely stood there, on a metal landing above the network of catwalks.
“One day, perhaps all Phyrexians will be planeswalkers. Eugenicists in the laboratories above are seeking the key.” He took her hand, leading her up a set of meshwork stairs toward a room at their top.
The nine-sided chamber was made of polished steel and lighted with powerstone lanterns. It gleamed in proud sterility. Only the red gowns of the four vat priests there gave any color to the chamber. Slabs of the same metal jutted from the walls—the size of pallets but as cold and unwelcoming as shelves in grave catacombs. Just now, only one of the platforms was occupied. The four vat priests and an assortment of complex artifact machines clustered around the figure. Three of the priests worked diligently, their fingers gory to the third knuckle. Sibilant whispers moved among them from behind the black masks they wore. The final priest took assiduous notes of everything said.
“These are my very best surgeons, trained by me personally,” Yawgmoth said. “They have been working on this same patient for over a month now. They’ve very carefully explored and documented every living tissue.”
“Living?” Rebbec peered past the priests. The creature in their midst could not have been alive.
The woman was laid open. A long, clean slice ran from the central finger of her left arm, down the palm, across the wrist, along the length of the arm, over the shoulder, across the torso to the right hip, and down to the central toe. All along that cut mark, skin had been carefully flayed back and pinned. Beneath, muscles had been parsed, fatty layers picked apart, tendons cleft and clamped, bones sawn in two. Wherever an organ was revealed, the ports into and out of it had been mapped with numbered pins that pulsed with the movements of fluids. Careful cuts had cloven the trembling outer sacks and laid open the warm centers. One severed lung seemed a pink sponge cake, here and there oozing cherry sauce. The vast and ruddy liver might have been a blood pudding through which someone had run a spoon. The pancreas was white and flaky like goat cheese. The kidney showed the intricate internal geometry of a cauliflower bulb. The intestines were gone entirely, and the stomach was merely a deflated sack. Still, the woman lived.
“Why are you doing this? Why are you tormenting her?” Rebbec said, tears coursing down her face.
“She feels no torment. She no longer has the capacity to feel torment.”
“What do you mean?” Rebbec whispered. “You’ve cut her wide open. How can she not feel torment?”
“She hasn’t the capacity. Every capacity of the human being has its seat in a specialized organ or system,” Yawgmoth explained simply. “Thought, motion, digestion, speech, reproduction, breathing, healing, pain…Disease is merely a dysfunction of these organs and systems. A person deprived of one of these organs is deprived of the capacity of the organ. We have deprived her of the organ of agony.”
Only then did Rebbec see the slim metal rod that jutted into the ragged cut in her forehead. The rod jiggled just slightly, with quiet but unmistakable rotation. Within that cracked skull, rotors moved.
Rebbec fell to her knees, burying her head in her hands.
“Similarly, a person granted a specific organ is granted its capacity. Humans cannot fly, for we have not the organ of flight—wings. Granted wings, we could soar like eagles.”
“Why, Yawgmoth. Why do you do this?”
“If there is a planeswalking organ—and there must be one—this woman has it. I soon will have it as well. They will find it in her, and they will put it inside of me.”
“You are a barbarian. You are a cannibal.”
Yawgmoth stared down at her, honest confusion in his eyes. “This is not barbarism. This is the truth. This is science.”
“You kill your enemy and eat her heart and her brain, hoping to gain her courage and wisdom. But you’ll never have courage, only ruthlessness, and you’ll never have wisdom, only arrogance.”
He grasped her arm and yanked her to her feet.
“I do this for our people. I do this for you. When I am a planeswalker, I can make all of us planeswalkers. Don’t you see? It is better that this one woman die to save the whole nation.”
She tried to pull free, but his grip was implacable. “Let go of me.”
Even as she struggled, Yawgmoth’s cloak swept around her. “I will never let go of you, Rebbec. As long as I hold you, I have that courage you spoke of, that wisdom. You are the organ of ascendance. As long as I hold you, I am not merely perfected but perfect.”
When the cloak opened again, they were in no place and every place. It was dark space, and yet shot through with light. It was a chaos place.
Then he wholly possessed her.
* * *
—
He had desired this moment since he had walked into that infirmary room years ago. He had desired it, but never before had the consummation aided his plans. Now, at long last, it did.
Suffusing her was like suffusing Phyrexia. He was the blood in her veins, the spark in her nerves. He sensed every corner of her being. He knew every thought. She was a world unto herself. Every memory, every thought was his. He saw the city when she had arrived, and the city when her temple was complete, and the schematics of every building that had gone up in the meantime. He saw Glacian when he was young and healthy, smelled ozone in his mana rig suit, felt the soft warmth of his hand. Yawgmoth heard echoing speeches among the dissolved Elder Council, tasted the bitterness of the water she had drunk last night, glimpsed the refugees clustered in their silo….
So that is what she is planning, he thought. She is planning to fly the refugees out of here—or was planning to do so. Surely not after this—
Hatred. She hated him. She felt only terror and loathing in his presence. Part of that terror was respect, of course. Part of it was a realization that he could not be bested or even equaled. Yawgmoth was heartened. Respect was something, but he had expected love, not loathing. Perhaps it was only recently she had come to hate him.
Was it when he took her away from Glacian? No, then she had felt drug-induced adoration. Was it when she saw her first Phyrexian up close? That had deepened the loathing and heightened her determination to save her city, but the hatred went back farther. It was there already when he had dropped the first stone-charger in the defile. It was there when he implanted the Phyrexian heart stone in Glacian. It was even there, in natal form, when Dyfed had transported the imprisoned elders to Mercadia. Noting what that world looked like, Yawgmoth pressed back farther. Though slender and small, her tiny hatred stretched all the way back to their first meeting, when Yawgmoth took a skin sample from her husband.
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