Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  The young master of arms backs cautiously away, among us. He is armed only with a sharp section of haft. The nearest new weapon lies hundreds of feet away, on the floor of the arena.

  Urza advances. The old man’s eyes glint madly. The facets of the Might- and Weakstone glimmer.

  They came from a single powerstone, split to create a portal between Dominaria and Phyrexia. Those stones had drawn away the life of the genius Glacian and had absorbed his split personality. Recharged, they had closed the portal for five millennia. Only Urza and Mishra reopened it. In reward, the stones shaped the boys into warring monsters. Mishra became Phyrexian, and so did Urza, though more subtly. He proves it now. With both stones in his head, Urza is at heart a true Phyrexian.

  He holds the trident overhead like a javelin, his arm cocked for the throw. It will have to be perfect. Once the weapon leaves Urza’s hand, he is defenseless.

  Gerrard lifts the haft to deflect the attack. He staggers back among us. We are on our feet, chanting, “Sy-lex! Sy-lex!” and throwing our fists in the air. Gerrard ducks behind a muscular digger. Its barrel body is a tight-wound skein of sinews. Its apelike arms rise to ward back a trident blow.

  It isn’t the trident that strikes first.

  Gerrard rams the splintery tip of his haft into our back. The improvised weapon cuts open flesh and shoves bone aside. We rise, a shriek keening from our tiny mouth. Our simian arms reach back to yank out the haft, but Gerrard only rams it deeper. We struggle to whirl, but he has somehow anchored the halberd’s butt.

  Only then does the trident soar from Urza’s hand. It hangs in air. The tines strike our flesh and pierce inward. Breath hisses from four sucking wounds. Metal points intersect the wooden pole. Caught between a sharpened stick and an impaling fork, we jolt downward.

  Gerrard has used us as a shield.

  We cannot breathe; we cannot stand. Only our enormous arms move, thrashing, impotent to slay our tormentors. We flap spasmodically. We feel our death and are thrilled.

  Better still, the gladiators are both weaponless.

  Gerrard is a master of arms and can make weapons where there are none. He kicks the bleeding back of the digger and sends the beast sprawling on Urza. Its massive hands grasp the old man. Its fingers clench. Wells of blood rise through skin and robes. Shrieking, the digger grapples Urza.

  We bellow. Gerrard is robbing us of the kill. He is slaying by proxy. He drives a mad beast upon his foe instead of fighting for himself.

  Our groans turn to joy.

  Urza has caught hold of the trident handle and twists it savagely. Tines spin, tearing through muscle, bone, lung, and heart. The digger slumps. Its hands release Urza. The trident slides in a chunky hail from its belly.

  We hiss. All around are more eyes and ears. We watch and hear and exult within the vast and murderous throng.

  Urza steps away, triumphant. His robes show blooming roses where the digger had crushed him, but he lofts the trident above his head. The points swing about toward Gerrard.

  The young man withdraws. He sees he cannot trick Urza, cannot outlast Urza, cannot even use the crowd against him. Gerrard withdraws. He retreats through the stands, his eyes ever upon his foe but his feet bringing him closer and closer to the balcony where we reside. Mere moments ago he was the predator, but now, the prey. He seeks shelter where there is none.

  We are sitting again, all hundred thousand of us. The tables have turned dramatically, but this tedious retreat is no thrilling thing.

  Then we see—Gerrard’s path leads to where a dead pneumagog lies. Its six wings splay metallically around it, fixed by the chance landing of a halberd head. Gerrard’s weapon even now juts from the cleft face. We had been so intent upon the fight, we had barely sensed the death of this creature.

  Gerrard kicks the riven axe to free it. The blade rolls through the cleft, but does not come loose. Gerrard hauls on the haft, and the blade grates against bone.

  Urza understands and closes the distance. He thrusts his trident in an impaling blow.

  Gerrard twists aside and grabs the trident shaft. Two tines pierce his flesh. The heads burrow through the upper bicep of Gerrard’s off-hand. His grip only tightens on the haft, struggling to stop its momentum.

  Urza rams the weapon deeper. One tine emerges through Gerrard’s arm. Another slides to jab shallowly into his chest, just above his heart.

  “At last,” Urza growls, “I do away with my greatest mistake.”

  “No, Urza,” shouts Gerrard in return. “I do away with it.”

  Urza lunges. The trident sinks deeper.

  Gerrard clutches it tightly and torques. Force travels shoulder to shoulder and down into his dominant arm. It chucks the halberd blade free of the pneumagog.

  Clutching the halberd head, Gerrard swings. The blade cleaves the screaming air. It arcs, perfect and silver to Urza’s throat. Metal slices flesh. The jugular looses its red gush down the planeswalker’s body. The spine gives little more resistance. A disk ruptures neatly. Nerves within are severed. Urza’s body sags, lifeless, beneath his staring eyes. The axe blade cuts out the far side of the neck and into clear air.

  Urza’s head comes free. It tumbles, goggling incredulously.

  Among us it tumbles. We shriek with delight and reach out to grasp it. There is a storm of claws around that spinning, gory prize. Nails drag flesh away from its staring cheeks.

  One hand catches the long, ash-blond hair and grabs hold. Gerrard’s hand. He yanks the head away from all the others. He pulls the trident from his wounded arm and catches the severed head. He lifts it high and is baptized in the blood of his creator.

  We shriek in delight. Every last one of us stands and roars down the sky. “Urza is dead! Urza is dead! Urza is dead!”

  Wearing an expression of grim triumph, the bloodied young man, Gerrard Capashen, strides through the crowd. He brandishes his prize and the weapon that won it, and he walks toward the balcony.

  His lips quietly repeat the chant: “Urza is dead.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Elsewhere, in Phyrexia

  For any planeswalker, the journey from Taysir’s grave to the first bomb site would have been a simple sideways step—for any planeswalker but Commodore Guff.

  Bedecked in his translucent suit of rubber, Guff was distracted by the way the damned thing ballooned and deflated with his every breath. He spat vitriolically, remembering too late the large round monocle that fronted his face. Spittle hung ignominiously before him.

  “This suit’s got worse ventilation than the last!”

  “Then don’t breathe,” Bo Levar replied. His eyes twinkled beneath the broad-brimmed pirate hat. Little lightnings on the plume shoved back snapping wires. Bo Levar extended an arm toward the commodore. “Here.”

  The commodore’s mustaches bristled, wiping the glass. “What?”

  “Not what, but where,” Bo Levar insisted. He did not wait for the commodore to reach out, instead gripping the man’s rubbery hand and launching them into a spontaneous planeswalk.

  He was none too soon. Even as they stepped from reality, the pneumagog city on the horizon bounced once and came to pieces. Freyalise and Windgrace had detonated their first charge. White air turned into red liquid—a flood of ash and steam and lava and heat.

  That reality ceased to be. Bo Levar and Commodore Guff appeared in another, equally daunting reality.

  Here, fields of sparking wires rose into a pair of huge drumlins, lateral braces for a gigantic dynamo. The machine loomed a mile into the sky and cast a deep shadow across the two planeswalkers. It was a wind turbine that could spawn cyclones.

  “I’ll be damned!” Guff said, both interjection and prediction. If the engine started up while they stood there, the commodore and the captain would be sucked in, chewed up, and spewed out. “Damned!”

  The tube-shaped engine was fronted by a series of nested fans around a central cone. The fan blades, each thousands of feet long and brutally sharp, could drag in oceans of air,
superheat it, and send it jetting out the rear of the machine. Such devices, positioned throughout the mountains of the sixth sphere, provided its gale-force winds.

  “This is a hell of a place,” muttered the commodore.

  “This is Phyrexia,” Bo Levar agreed. He swept his hat off and pointed toward the base of the machine. In the wire-strewn hillside lay a dark hollow. Within stood support struts and sabotaged power conduits. “It was even worse before I shut down the turbine.”

  Guff goggled in surprise. The expression was grotesquely exaggerated by the monocle. “You?”

  Bo Levar nodded. “I couldn’t set the bomb at its base while I battled the wind. I had enough work to do, fighting off the machine’s defenders.”

  “Which would be—” began Commodore Guff.

  Figures rose into the air around the machine. They seemed huge, shabby jellyfish.

  “Witch engines,” Bo Levar supplied.

  The horrid machines floated high and enormous like storm clouds. Titanic spines bristled across their backs. Beneath them dangled hundreds of articulated limbs, each tipped with a barbed claw that could snatch up a whole platoon.

  Commodore Guff coughed discreetly into his monocle and said, “I believe you said, old chum, that you were spoiling for a fight, and I could do the bomb work?”

  “I believe you said that,” replied Bo Levar, “but I agree.” He donned his hat again. With a thought, fabric hardened into armor. “Make it quick.” Then, with another thought, he ‘walked to the witch engines.

  Bo Levar set right to work. He cast a net of blue magic out across a witch engine. As all blue magic, this took control of a foe’s strengths and turned them to weakness. Where tendrils of power touched, the sharp spines of the witch engine shrank. They reached the pores that had spawned them, and then grew inward. The machine quivered and smoked as spines extended themselves through the vitals of the beast. Quills transfixed the engine, ripping it open. Innards tumbled out in a grisly hail.

  Bo Levar spent no time admiring his handiwork, turning toward the next machine. His second spell summoned a storm of ball lightning. Globes of energy swarmed up to crash upon the witch engine. They slid down the spines to splash against the skin of the beast. As more jags raced across it, the engine began to cook. Fingers of lightning jabbed all across it, searing the skin and then ripping it wide.

  “He sure made quick work of them,” Commodore Guff said, impressed. The thought reminded him of his own task. He tried to snap his fingers, but succeeded only in fusing the rubber together. “Quick work. Damn it. What am I thinking?” He took a step and was there.

  As daunting as the great dynamo had seemed from half a mile distant, it was horrifying here at its base. The machine seemed a titan squatting on the world. Its fuselage cast the structural work below in deep darkness. Massive footings, with steel struts as wide around as magnigoth trees, anchored the dynamo. Beneath the wire-covered surface, the support structures delved deeper. Power conduits ran in thick packs across the beams. Many of these wires had been hacked apart, clearing the way inward.

  The commodore huffed. “Said he’d disabled the engine. Hacked through it like a man through cane, more like. Sloppy work.” The commodore lowered himself into the hewn space. Stepping on a framework of beams over empty blackness, Guff strode inward. All around him, severed wires formed a spitting corridor.

  “Don’t even need to use my hands—”

  The observation was cut short by the impact of a witch engine on the ground outside. The framework beneath Guff bounced. Gargantuan beams moaned. Maggot engines, loosed from the ruptured skin of the witch, scattered outward like spilled beads.

  To steady himself, Guff grabbed a double handhold of ruptured wire. Energy snapped at his fingertips but couldn’t penetrate the rubber bodysuit. He cast an irritable glance upward.

  “All right. I’m hurrying.”

  Four more unsteady steps, and Commodore Guff reached the bomb. Like the others of its ilk, this incendiary device packed an amazing wallop in a small package. The bomb resided on the nexus plates of five separate load channels. Once this connection was blown, the machine would fall into the darkness beneath it, and a huge rent would open to the seventh sphere.

  To set off the bomb would be a simple thing, a mere crossing of wires. There, beneath the brushed-steel shell, the backup ignition wire reached out around the powerstone. Merely touching the wire to the opposite bushing would set off the explosion. The difficulty would be communicating to Bo Levar just when the pirate should step away from his blazing battle. Too soon, and the defenders would swarm the commodore. Too late would be quite literally too late.

  “Just have to go tell him,” Guff said to himself.

  The commodore turned away from the bomb and headed back up the corridor of hissing wires. All around him, narrow filaments emitted points of light, large tubes oozed hydraulic fluids, corrugated vents issued purplish mist, severed cables sparked—

  Another impact jarred the ground. Guff’s foot slipped into darkness. He plunged. His hands reached out to grab something solid—those two thick cables—

  He did not lay hold of the cables. They laid hold of him, or rather the current in them did. Sensing a willing conduit, energy surged up out of the wires and into the commodore’s fingers. It roared through the sinews of his being, sending lightning up his biceps, down his ribs, through his heart, and out along every nerve in his body. His hair stood on end. His mustache bled light. Power crackled across his irises, making them spin like miniature gambling wheels. These were only tangential detours. Most of the power poured through him and into the opposite cable.

  Commodore Guff shuddered. His teeth rattled. He flailed, but could not break his hold. The surge was both excruciating and energizing. Despite the havoc it played with his senses, the charge at last cleared the fog from the monocle. His face glowed lantern-bright, and the monocle projected its image up the corridor and out onto the sky.

  A sound took hold of the world. It was the unmistakable noise of an engine starting up.

  Guff’s sun-bright lips mouthed the word, “Oops.”

  * * *

  —

  Bo Levar clawed his way through a witch engine. He’d killed this one from the inside out. Now, he had to escape it before it killed him. His fingers tore open the outer skin. His hands grasped the wet membranes and hauled him upward. He flung off a pair of maggot machines that clung to him. With a surge of his feet—augmented by jets of flame from his toes—Bo Levar escaped the beast. It caught fire explosively as he fled into the sky.

  There, in the white heavens, he saw a strange omen—a beaming sun with the face of Commodore Guff. If that weren’t strange enough, the glowing orb seemed to be saying, “Oops.”

  Shaking his head, Bo Levar said, “Oh, no.”

  A quick glance toward the bomb bunker confirmed that the image came from it. The once-black space glared blindingly. Bo Levar tried to planeswalk there, but the turbine’s power distorted the spatial geometry. He grasped the edges of his broad-brimmed hat, turned over in midair, and plunged toward the spot. His intent was to save his comrade, but in fact he saved himself.

  The wind turbine suddenly began to spin. Gigantic fan blades gripped the air and yanked it into the deep cylinder. Faster, they turned. Wind sluiced into the engine like water down a drain.

  Bo Levar tucked his head and redoubled the thrust of his flight spell. Even so, the cyclone tore at his robes, dragging him toward the turbine.

  The final three witch engines were in worse shape—nearer to the turbine and more voluminous. One engine hadn’t a chance. It slid back toward the dynamo, struck the cone at its center, sloughed from it onto the whirling blades, and was chewed to pieces. Hunks of shredded leg tumbled through the vanes. They pelted the main body and scoured its bristles from it. The body tumbled across the blades until it split open and spilled its maggot machines.

  The next witch engine angled against the wind. It made slow progress from the cyclone,
and would have escaped but for its long, trailing legs. They swept around in its wake, tilting its body crazily and destabilizing it. It slipped suddenly into the turbine. Impacting with great force, the witch engine disintegrated.

  The influx of shattered material clogged the dynamo for a moment. The wind slackened.

  Bo Levar soared down to the bomb bunker.

  Unfortunately, so did the final witch engine. With every bristle intact, the monster pursued Bo Levar. Its claws thrashed the air just above him.

  Bo Levar sneaked a glance beneath his streamlined hat, noticed his imminent peril, and, for lack of a better alternative, made frantic breaststroke motions.

  A claw lashed down and caught him. Its tendrils pierced his captain’s cloak and yanked him upward. Through a forest of other tentacles he passed, on his way toward the ravening gullet.

  He hadn’t the power to slay this beast outright—he’d already single-handedly defeated four—but had the wit to defeat its claws. He reached up into the now pierced and rumpled captain’s cloak and, from a special compartment lined with steel tubes, pulled out a cigar. A snap of his fingers awoke sufficient flame to light it. He puffed thrice. Blue smoke curled away from him and wreathed the tentacle. One last long draw, and he jammed the hot end into the creature’s leg.

  No creature enjoys a cigar burn, not even a vasty Phyrexian nightmare, but the pain was only a gnat bite—at first. Bo Levar had selected a special cigar, one rolled with less tobacco and more gunpowder.

  The explosion was a small one compared to all the roar and thunder of the turbine, but it was powerful enough to blast the leg in two.

  Bo Levar tumbled through the air, his suit still pinned on the severed leg. He’d intended to hand the smoke to Urza after successfully destroying Phyrexia, a kind of planeswalker practical joke. This alternative was almost as pleasant.

  If I see that bastard again, I’ll give him more than an exploding cigar.