Planar Chaos

by Timothy Sanders

  Karn’s preternaturally clear mind reached out to the world he had created, suffusing Mirrodin with his consciousness and taking its measure. There had not been a major conflict or crisis in Mirrodin for over one hundred years, but something about the place troubled Karn. He felt as a man would upon returning home from a short vacation to find his house and everything in it moved slightly to the left.

  Jeska approached him. She was keen-eyed and wore her bushy red hair pinned behind her neck in a heavy iron clip. “What do you see?” she said.

  “The same,” Karn replied. “Things grow and evolve and change as I anticipated. But there is more at work here.”

  Jeska fidgeted, her hand teasing the handle of the short sword on her belt. “Are you almost through? I want to get moving again.”

  “Patience,” Karn said, which had become his a mantra when dealing with Jeska. She was quick to act and react, but her alacrity sometimes made her edgy and quarrelsome. If Jeska wasn’t doing something that engaged her she usually found someone or something to distract her—and with the power she had, her distractions could quickly turn into disasters.

  “I don’t even know why you come back here so often. The place hasn’t changed in centuries. Whatever you’re looking for has either happened already or is never going to happen.”

  Karn shivered, a cold, electric sensation that drove Jeska’s restlessness from his mind. Something flashed in the back of his head, not a voice but a sound that nonetheless conveyed intent and meaning.

  “Did you hear something?”

  Jeska cocked her head. “No. Should I have?”

  “No.” The silver golem smiled. “I’m not sure I should have.” He lowered his thick, metal arms and crossed them behind his back. Facing Jeska he said, “I’m finished here for now. Where would you like to go next?”

  Jeska’s eyes lit up. “Rabiah,” she said.

  “I don’t know if you’re ready for Rabiah.”

  “You mean you aren’t ready to take me there.”

  “Actually, I mean Rabiah isn’t ready for you.”

  “I could go myself. Any time I liked.”

  “True. That is, if you could find it. But then we would be deprived of each other’s company.” He turned his back on Mirrodin and considered. “What if I showed you Mercadia? It’s a mercantile plane. I have friends there.”

  Jeska tossed her hair so that the iron clip thumped against her spine. “Then Rabiah?”

  “We shall see. Come.” Karn extended his hand. “And please keep an ear out for any unusual sounds. I’m sure I heard something. It’s best to listen when a strange voice calls your name.”

  Jeska nodded and shrugged simultaneously. “As you say.” She took Karn’s hand and they both faded from sight.

  * * *

  —

  Jhoira awoke elsewhere. She knew this wasn’t Shiv before her eyes had opened and her brain cast off the waking fog that muddled her thinking. It was cold, very cold. Far colder than Shiv was even in the darkest predawn hours. Colder than Urborg should be, and if her recollection served, colder than it ever had been.

  Jhoira sat up. Disoriented, she swung her head left and right, craning for as complete a view as she could manage. It could well be Urborg. There were vast stretches of oil-black swamp and marshland. Picked-clean skeleton bones and metallic limbs sat mired in huge lakes of tarry goo. There were distant copses of spiky, soot-encrusted evergreens, carbonized cypress trees, and toxic pines with grim, ebon needles.

  It had to be Urborg. The Stronghold itself hunched menacingly on the horizon, a thick sharp wedge of black rock. The circular Stronghold rift still churned and roiled in the sky over the mountain fortress, illuminating the area below in its eerie purple light.

  It was definitely Urborg, she decided. Yet if that was true, why was there snow on the ground? Why were there icicles hanging from the trees? Why could she see her breath roll out of her lungs in thick, white clouds? Why did she shiver, why did her teeth chatter, why had her feet gone numb?

  It was impossible for the swamps to be this cold. Urborg was one of the Spice Islands, a volcanic chain situated over one of the most seismically active areas on the globe. Venser’s home sat near the center of a tropical weather zone, so Urborg hadn’t seen a hard freeze, snow, or even frost for almost six hundred years.

  Jhoira got to her feet, now casting around for Venser or the ambulator. Just as this could not be Urborg, the ambulator could not have separated from Jhoira. She was on board, subject to the same magical forces that carried both device and pilot to the intended locale. If the ambulator functioned at all, it had to take her with it.

  Jhoira paused and pondered, shuddering at the gloom. Perhaps the ambulator didn’t function after all. Maybe Venser’s machine was never going to operate as he intended. Jhoira wondered if perhaps it could not.

  No, she corrected herself. The device had worked, had functioned exactly as it was designed and developed to function. Venser’s genius and the Ghitu tribe’s experience had left no room for errors. The machine had worked. It had taken them to their destination.

  Jhoira shivered anew and hunched her shoulders. If this was Urborg, then their destination itself had radically changed since they were here only weeks ago.

  “Excuse me.”

  Startled, Jhoira jerked her head toward the unseen man’s voice. He sounded calm and friendly. Jhoira struggled to flex her freezing muscles and prepared for the worst.

  “Hello.” He came out of the icy mist on foot, a tall man with dark hair and a tall, proud forehead. He was broad-shouldered but lean—his wiry arms were crossed outside his fur overcoat and pulled it tight around his middle. His face was open and his eyes were a deep, penetrating blue. The golden-blond pelt stitched around the overcoat’s hood framed the man’s face and chin like a thick mane of hair and a lush, thick beard.

  “Urza?” Jhoira whispered.

  “Hm.” The man’s eyes twinkled. He pulled the hood back to expose his face and head to the elements. “I’m afraid not. Who I am is someone who thinks you’re not really dressed for this weather.” Without hesitation, the smiling man stripped off his fur overcoat and held it out to Jhoira. She stared at it for a moment, then looked up at the stranger and shook her head.

  “Suit yourself.” Undisturbed, the man drew back the fur and tucked it under his arm. He stared at Jhoira, studying her, and said, “Do you have a place to go? You won’t last the night if you stay outdoors.”

  Jhoira shook off another wave of lethargy. She had thrived in colder places than this. She had honed her survival skills in some of the most dangerous terrains across the multiverse, realms of fire and snow alike. The cold here would never kill her. But, she thought, as she glanced down at the bones in the lake of tar, Urborg’s predators would almost certainly have an easy time of it.

  She faced the stranger and tried to gauge his character. Assuming this was his real face, Jhoira now saw he was not her old headmaster, though he did bear a resemblance. He seemed genuinely human, but then he could be just another Urborg monster in a charming mask. There was something off about him, a discordant note in an otherwise pleasant melody. She couldn’t allow herself to trust him until she knew more.

  “Forgive my hesitation,” she said. “I am newly arrived and lost. In such circumstances I tend toward the overcautious.”

  “Sound thinking,” the man said. “In this place there is no other way.”

  “Would you help put my fears to rest?”

  “Of course. I would like nothing more.” He blew on his hands. “Your pardon. I’m not really used to this weather myself.” He folded his arms across his chest again so that the fur hung down over his belly. “Now. What can I do to convince you not to let yourself freeze to death?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am a traveler.” The stranger bowed.

  “Not an answer. Are you a planeswalker?”

  This raised a half smile. “No. I hate to presume, but I’d say that I am as mor
tal as you.” When he said this, the man’s eyes opened wider and bored into Jhoira’s. He winked at her.

  It then hit Jhoira what it was that made the stranger so unsettling. Though he appeared to be no older than thirty, the man’s eyes were profound and fascinating far beyond their vivid color. Like Jhoira herself, the stranger had centuries of experience behind those eyes. Like her, he was older than he looked, far older.

  The first glimmers of realization began to form. Jhoira felt a rush of clarity and she said, “What is your name?”

  The man raised one eyebrow. “I will answer. But then you must introduce yourself. It’s only polite.”

  “Agreed.”

  The man bowed again. “Or,” he said, glancing up but leaving his torso doubled over, “I could tell you who you are, for I’ve traveled a long way to be here for the sole purpose of meeting you. Then you may tell who I am, as I’m almost certain you’ve just worked it out.”

  Jhoira nodded. “You are Jodah, Archmage Eternal of the Unseen Academy.”

  “At your service.” Jodah bowed lower, then straightened to his full height. “Though that title is woefully out of date. ‘Archmage Eternal Emeritus’ would be more accurate.”

  She offered a half-hearted shrug. “It is how you are remembered in the history texts.”

  “When it comes to history texts,” Jodah said. “I find it’s usually better not to be remembered at all.”

  Jhoira wrapped her thin Ghitu robes around her and straightened up. “And you know me, Archmage?”

  “Please,” he said. “Call me Jodah. And yes, Jhoira of the Ghitu. I know you, or at least of you. You are the eldest elder from Shiv’s elite, nomad artificers. You practically invented Thran metal.”

  “Tch,” Jhoira said. “The desert is unkind to flatterers.” She bowed lightly. “It is an honor to meet you, Jodah. But why are you here? And how do you know me?”

  Jodah’s face tightened but his voice remained calm. “I have seen and survived several major catastrophes over the years. Frankly, I’d be a much bigger fool than I am if I didn’t see this one coming.”

  “You know about the rifts?” Jhoira was instantly alert, her voice crisp and strident. “Time and energy phenomena, like the one over the Stronghold?”

  Jodah shook his head. “I don’t know much of anything for sure. But I do have a feel for things, and I learned a long time ago to follow such feelings wherever they lead me. I have…extensive resources at my disposal. So I did my homework, as any good archmage should, and it led me here. It led me to you.” He shifted his feet in the snow. “I believe we have a common purpose, Jhoira.” His smile grew strained. “I know we have a common enemy.”

  Jhoira nodded. Her eyes were still sharp and probing. “The rifts threaten everything.”

  Jodah shook his head. “I don’t know anything about rifts.”

  “Then what did you mean…” She paused, remembering the especially frigid temperatures in Radha’s home halfway around the world. “The cold, then? The unnatural winter here and in Keld?”

  “The cold is everywhere,” Jodah said. “Everywhere there’s been world-shattering magic. And I believe something very nasty is exploiting it. Our enemy is a person, not a weather condition. I’m not saying the cold is a blessing. It’s a threat, a serious one. But it’s not the problem I’m most concerned with.”

  Jhoira felt a familiar knot tighten in her stomach. “Our enemy…planeswalker?”

  Jodah sighed but his smile remained. “Two things, Jhoira: You must put on this coat right now.” He extended the fur once more. “And you have to stop assuming that everyone is a planeswalker.”

  Jhoira felt her face crinkling in annoyance, but at least the tightness in her gut eased off. “I have a long and checkered history with planeswalkers, sir. If you scratch deep enough where ‘world-shattering magic’ has happened, you’ll usually find one.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said breezily. “I’ve been there.”

  Jhoira took the coat and said, “Thank you.” She wrapped it around her shoulders and instantly realized how truly cold she had been. The archmage emeritus was right, she would not have lasted much longer without shelter.

  “Do you have a place to go?” she said. “If the offer still stands, I would like to get out of the weather and hear about this common enemy.”

  “I do,” Jodah said. “And you will. But I think it’s best we collect your friend first.”

  Jhoira’s jaw clenched. “What do you know about my friend?”

  Jodah blew on his hands again. He sounded slightly amused. “You are an extremely suspicious person, Jhoira of the Ghitu.”

  “It’s how I’ve lived this long.”

  He chuckled. “Well, I know nothing about your friend, not really. What I do know is he hurtled through here in a glowing machine. It was a truly spectacular entrance, and I’m surely not the only one who noticed it.” Jodah pointed. “He came down somewhere over there. I think he landed very hard. It’s extremely cold tonight, and getting colder as we speak. And Lord Windgrace has been enforcing a punishable-by-death artifact ban in the swamps for a hundred years.”

  Jhoira remembered the gladehunters who had been attacking Venser when she first met him. She was ready to trust Jodah this far, especially if Venser was in danger. But first she smiled wickedly. “See? Windgrace. Planeswalker.”

  Jodah bowed. “Touché.”

  She cinched the coat around her waist and stepped forward. “Take me there,” she said. “And you go first.”

  In all of his previous experiments Venser’s ambulator either moved him instantaneously from one place to another or it didn’t move him at all. He would feel an unsettling internal wrench and his vision would cloud over with golden fog, or he’d feel nothing at all except frustration.

  Nothing in his experience prepared him for the Ghitu ambulator’s dizzying rush of speed or its cometlike crash landing. The heavy chair and armored rig protected him from serious injury, but Venser had screamed himself hoarse as he plowed into the half-frozen bog. Now he sat dazed and mired up to his knees in the muck, listening to ooze as it filled in the steaming trench behind him.

  Venser scanned the swamp around him and exhaled deeply. It worked, he thought. I’m home. It had been the fastest trial ever with the worst landing, but the new ambulator had carried him across a thousand miles of open ocean in a matter of seconds.

  Venser blinked. “Jhoira?” He twisted out of the ambulator and stood on the dais. He turned too quickly and almost overbalanced with the metal rig on his shoulders. Muttering angrily, Venser pushed the clumsy device into a more comfortable spot as he rotated his shoulders and rolled his neck to work the kinks out of his muscles.

  There was no sign of her. He was disturbed by this but told himself it was most likely she had not made the trip at all. They had designed the machine to carry several people at once, and had ensured that the magical field that surrounded the ambulator also covered everyone on it. He told himself that if the field had failed, it had surely done so at the very start of the trip and not halfway through. If he had lost Jhoira, it happened back in Shiv and not in midair over Urborg.

  He shivered. The weather was fouler than usual and much colder. He couldn’t remember the last time it had snowed, but now there were several inches of sooty gray already on the ground. The marsh crunched under his feet as he stepped off the dais, a noisy mixture of mud, ice, and frigid water.

  Had Jhoira been left behind? He couldn’t be sure. He remembered Teferi gesturing as the ambulator departed—had the planeswalker snatched Jhoira away at the last second for some other purpose?

  Venser shook his head and fought off a sneeze. He steeled himself and took one last look at the ambulator. It was stuck in the mud but otherwise intact and entirely ready for another jaunt. He considered using it to hop back and forth across Urborg until he found Jhoira but decided it would be just as quick to search the surrounding area on foot. If he didn’t find her here, he would take th
e ambulator back to Shiv and retrace his steps from there.

  He hiked in an expanding circular pattern with the ambulator at its center. He didn’t call her name, reasoning that she would have answered him by now if she were able. Also, he didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself then he had to. If the gladehunters weren’t already on the way, there were plenty of nightstalkers and mireshades who would be happy to attend to a lone human.

  Venser was fifty yards from the ambulator when he heard the sounds of battle. It was not the sort of battle he was used to, one of feral snarls, slashing claws, and the occasional drawn blade. This sounded more like a full-scale war, complete with explosions and heavy machinery and the awful, moaning sound of seaborne warships scraping against one another.

  Venser glanced back at the ambulator, then carefully scaled the muddy hill between him and the noise. Less than a hundred yards away he saw dozens, perhaps hundreds, of combatants rushing back and forth in a wild melee. The noise was atrocious, a cacophony of tearing flesh, shattered metal, and inhuman screams. Venser stared at the chaos for a few moments, his breath condensing on his cheeks as the wind blew it back into his face.

  There was no way to tell how long the battle had raged, but the wide expanse of frozen marshland before him was almost covered by strange and terrifying creatures. Two large forces came together in the center of Venser’s view, one composed of fell beasts from the wilds of Urborg and the other of machine horrors that surged from the Stronghold mountain’s belly. Venser followed the long line of artifact nightmares all the way back to the mountain, and he estimated there were two hundred of them or more, varying in size and shape from humanoid foot soldiers to airborne winged devils to fat, squat war engines that rolled over Urborg’s fauna like fast-moving glaciers.