Planeshift

by J. Robert King

  “Now we have our army! Every great warlord who ever lived joins us. They join us to fight the final battle of Twilight!”

  Swarming downward, the first of the ancient warriors reached the base of the cliff. They drove the Phyrexians before them.

  Rising to her feet, Doyenne Tajamin stared in awe. “With the eternal champions fighting for us, we cannot fall!”

  Eladamri spoke, his voice quiet with dread. “But…they do not fight for us.”

  Doyenne Tajamin stared toward the front lines, where the ancient dead of Keld slew their own living warriors. “Atrocity….”

  CHAPTER 15

  New Troops for Urborg

  As Weatherlight tore the air above Urborg, Tahngarth tore the ground below. His ray cannon laid a highway of fire across an Urborgan slope. Beams ripped up grasses and dirt before striking the first Phyrexian bombard embrasure. It flared and melted, its crew buried in molten metal.

  Across the forecastle, Gerrard was ranting. “Where the hell is Agnate!” he shouted. His cannon echoed the sentiment. Rays darted down into a swamp. Light ignited gases, which burst in a sudden blue glow. Azure fire wrapped a contingent of Phyrexians. They burned, white smoke pouring from beneath peeled black armor. Gerrard gritted his teeth in satisfaction. “We can’t fight the land battle too. These Metathran are worthless without him. Where the hell is Agnate?”

  Weatherlight vaulted on, above a slough of skeletal trees.

  Tahngarth considered grimly. “Perhaps he has fallen.”

  “Then the land battle is lost,” Gerrard roared. “Look at them!”

  As Weatherlight shot out beyond an ancient brake of thistle, Tahngarth looked down. Lowlands opened before the ship. There, a contingent of ten thousand Metathran crouched in shallow trenches. Their battle-axes lay idle beside them. Instead, they set powerstone pikes against impending attack. The woods beyond teemed with monsters, gathering to charge.

  Gerrard sent a blistering shot down among them. It blasted a few Phyrexians but did little more.

  “The damned Metathran entrench and wait! They brace for attack! Who’s commanding them? With Agnate, they advanced.”

  Tahngarth snorted. “Without a great commander, the Metathran are nothing. We need new troops. Another army. Too bad Weatherlight can’t carry more than a thousand.” He loosed a single shot that moaned as it descended toward the trees. “If you found the right army, where every warrior was worth ten…”

  Casting a wicked glance over his shoulder, Gerrard said, “Excellent idea, Tahngarth!” He leaned to the speaking tube. “Sisay, prepare to planeshift.”

  Her voice answered from the tube. “Where to?”

  “Tahngarth’s homeland.”

  Tahngarth sagged in the traces. Ever since he had been tortured in the Stronghold, he had dreaded returning to his people. To minotaurs, appearances mattered. A handsome beast was a virtuous warrior. A twisted creature was a monster. Under the torments of Greven il-Vec, Tahngarth had become a monster. He was certain his folk would reject him. His hands went numb on the fire controls. Urborg scrolled, watery and black, beneath him.

  “I’ve got the coordinates laid in,” Sisay replied.

  “Take us there,” Gerrard said. “The rest of the fleet and the Serrans can hold the skies while we’re gone. Do it.”

  Sisay sent Weatherlight in a long, steady climb up the skies. Her engines roared. Her airfoils tucked. The Gaea figurehead drove up through racks of cloud. In moments, the island shrank to stern. The prow carved a hole in the heavens.

  With a clap like thunder, Dominaria vanished. Blue sky dissolved into gray chaos. It buzzed in deadly disarray just beyond Weatherlight’s power envelope.

  Tahngarth stared bleakly out at the Blind Eternities. This nowhere place somehow soothed him.

  The planeshift was done all too soon. The envelope around Weatherlight turned to sky and water. Suddenly, all the world was blue and white. Above the hurtling ship arced a cerulean dome. Below it stretched an endless sea. The two were halves of each other, brilliance and darkness. Weatherlight slid between them, her prow pointing toward the arrow-straight horizon.

  “Where is it?” rumbled Tahngarth.

  “I don’t know,” replied Sisay. “The coordinates are correct.” Her words faded away to the roar of the engines.

  “What do you mean?” Tahngarth asked. “How can a whole continent disappear?”

  Gerrard snapped his fingers. “Teferi!”

  “What?” the minotaur barked.

  “Urza said something about his phasing out Zhalfir—magically taking it. He said only the sea remained. He must have taken the Talruum mountains too.”

  Tahngarth stood and peered at the choppy sea. He couldn’t believe it. “He took the whole continent?”

  Gerrard shrugged. “That’s what Urza said.”

  It was a brutal irony. A moment ago, he feared rejection from his people. Now, they didn’t even exist.

  Faltering, Gerrard added, “Urza said something about refugees. He said a contingent of Talruum minotaurs went to Hurloon.”

  “Next stop, Hurloon?” Sisay asked.

  Eyes blazing with fire, Tahngarth growled at Gerrard, “Why are you doing this?”

  Gerrard cast a glance behind him. “You said we needed another army.”

  Eyes darkening, Tahngarth crossed his arms. “How are you going to enlist their aid?”

  Gerrard shrugged. “I don’t know. Honor? The promise of a brutal fight? What do you suggest?”

  “Don’t expect me to be your liaison, Gerrard. They will hate me.”

  Gerrard shot back, “They just don’t know you like I do.” Turning to the speaking tube, he said, “Captain Sisay, take us to Hurloon.”

  “Aye, Commander.”

  Tahngarth closed his eyes as the engines took hold of his stomach. He felt the beaming sun go out of existence. His shoulders grew cold. The tearing winds of the deck died to nothing. The whine of Weatherlight’s power core was dampened, sound slipping away into the Blind Eternities. Tahngarth did not watch. He could not bear to see the world dissolve again.

  Sound changed. The engine’s clamor rebounded from ground. Sudden wind tore at Tahngarth’s hide. The cold of evening wrapped him, the wet of alluvial plains. Wood smoke hung in the air. This would be Hurloon. He opened his eyes.

  Immediately he wished he hadn’t. Below, in the last glow of the day, stretched an enormous wasteland. It had once been the city of Kaldroom, a garrison ground for centuries of minotaur warriors. Now, the city was in ruins. Every roof, every fence, every wooden thing had burned away. Only stone foundations and rubble walls remained. They twisted away to the horizon. Within them lay bodies, minotaur bodies—bulls and cows and calves. They had died where they had stood, slaughtered by the same fire that had destroyed their city. The streets of the city were lined with craters. Smoldering fires lit the darkness. They sent gray smoke skyward. Weatherlight shot among them, stirring the smoke in twin vortices.

  Tahngarth pulled himself from the gunner traces and stood at the rail. He stared with bald horror at the scene below. These had not been warriors. These had been merchants and teachers and families. The fire that had slain them had not fallen from the sky. It had burned on Rath as the world overlaid. With utter precision, the Phyrexians had turned a whole city into an oven.

  Lifting his head to the skies, Tahngarth released a roar. It mixed with the thrum of the engines and the shout of the air. Long and furious, the sound pealed out across the plains.

  The minotaurs of Talruum were gone, and those of Kaldroom were slaughtered wholesale. Better to have disappeared into the ocean than to have died like this. And what of the other cities? Was Tahngarth the last of his people to live? Twisted into the semblance of Phyrexian monstrosity, was he all that remained of the once-proud race?

  Weatherlight shrieked out across the city t
o the garrison grounds. Half the population of Kaldroom had dwelt within the barracks of that place. They remained. Minotaur warriors were laid foot-to-head, row on row across the ground. Their bodies were pristine, untouched by the fire that had destroyed the populace. Even their armor was polished, even their uniforms. Not one showed the wound that had killed him. Their eyes had all been propped open as hunters do to the creatures they stuff. What were these corpses? Trophies? Why would Phyrexians bother to chain corpses together?

  “They’re alive….” Tahngarth whispered breathlessly. The realization prickled his hide with a memory.

  He is trapped. A red beam stabs down at him from a panel above. It strikes his flesh. It twists his horns and swells his muscles and transforms him into a monster.

  Shaken by the flashback, Tahngarth suddenly knew why the Phyrexians had kept these warriors alive.

  Without bothering with his gunner’s harness, Tahngarth swung his cannon to the fore and was squeezing off his first shot before he had even glimpsed what must lie beyond. Red rays ripped the air, plunging toward a huge black building, as amorphous as a mountain. It was a flowstone laboratory, grown on Rath and overlaid on Kaldroom. Tahngarth’s shot struck the side of the structure. It lit up a portico and bathed the scabrous priests that stood there. They burned like paper. The portico collapsed. A hole opened in the wall. Through it, Tahngarth glimpsed what lay within: torture chambers, vivisection tables, vats of glistening-oil. It was only a moment’s glimpse before Weatherlight hurtled above the black rooftop, but it was enough to convince Tahngarth.

  “We must destroy that building!”

  “What is it?” Gerrard shouted as Weatherlight entered a long, sweeping turn to port.

  “A Phyrexian incubation ground. They’ve killed the citizens and have somehow drugged the garrison. They’re going to turn them into monsters. They’re going to make them all like me. We have to destroy that factory.”

  A beam stabbed up from the structure and sliced across the sky. It howled so close overhead that the hairs on Tahngarth’s head curled. Two more shots roared from other guns.

  “They’re on to us!” Sisay shouted.

  Weatherlight dropped out from under the bolts. She spread her wings to catch the air. A sudden flare of her engines skipped her out along the lowlands. Flack burst in a tight trail behind her.

  Gerrard, the amidships gunners, and Squee at the tail filled the skies with answering fire.

  Tahngarth meanwhile clambered into his traces. “Bring us about so I can draw a bead!”

  “I’m still being evasive!” Sisay hissed.

  A plasma blast from the laboratory swarmed up toward Gerrard’s gun. The energy did not seem to move, only to grow wider. Cursing, Gerrard shot a volley down the throat of the attack. Energy met energy. The center of the plasma ball was ripped away, but its mantle still struck the ship. Plasma ate through the port gunwale and two of the ribs. It dissolved the rail on either side of Gerrard’s gun, and flack arched over his head.

  The speaking tubes were suddenly jammed with voices:

  “Multani, hold us together!”

  “Target those guns, Squee!”

  “Tuck the wings!”

  “Full power!”

  “Bring us about!”

  The shouts were echoed in blazing rays from the guns and roaring fire from the engines. Like an angry hornet angling toward its tormentor, Weatherlight shot above the trailing fire. Her port-side guns bled the sky. She turned her bow hard toward the laboratory.

  At last Tahngarth could draw a bead. He unleashed a barrage that lit up the fields below. Flares overwhelmed Phyrexian fire and pulverized the gun that had flung it. A second blast obliterated another bombard along the structure’s edge. Tahngarth shifted his aim toward the roof line. The other gunners could take out the weaponry. Tahngarth would destroy the factory.

  A blast ripped a long hole in the roof. Another burned away rafters and gantries. The third punched past, to row on row of vats. The golden stuff in them was glistening-oil, the placental fluid of newts. The volatile liquid made one strike work like five.

  Vats exploded. The miserable creatures within died in an instant. They would not bear Tahngarth’s shame. Blasts rocked the structure and hurled metal and glass outward. Blazing oil lit more vats. They flamed and burst. A chain reaction swept through the incubation chambers. In manifold explosions, the core of the building went up.

  Not pausing to admire the conflagration, Tahngarth hurled bolts of destruction into the adjacent rooftops. Vivisection laboratories were laid bare. Their inhabitants glared upward in startled dread in the moments before they were broiled alive. More shots ripped open the torture chambers.

  Tahngarth stared feverishly down. A strange abstraction contorted the scene before him.

  His gun is a flat panel in the ceiling. It pours a red ray down onto his flesh. The stinging strokes repair his deformity. They return his soul to its former, beautiful state.

  Yes, he felt the shuddering of Weatherlight as she took blast after blast. Yes, he knew that by the time the factory and its defenders were destroyed, the ship would not be battle worthy, perhaps not even sky worthy. It didn’t matter. Tahngarth would save them. He would save his people the fate he had endured, and in saving them, he would save himself.

  CHAPTER 16

  In Yawgmoth’s Workshop

  Nine titans towered above a blasted underworld.

  The second sphere of Phyrexia was a scrap heap. The ground consisted of rusted iron and corroded brass. Inert machines lay like dead giants on the horizon. Here and there, smokestacks jutted from the ground. They spewed constant pillars of soot high into the air. The metallic waste spread into a churning black firmament miles overhead. Among columns of soot rose columns of metal. Girders and pipes ran like veins on their outer edges. As wide around as whole cities, the pillars extended from the ground to the smoggy firmament above. Here and there, the clouds parted to show not an open sky but a closed vault. It was the underbelly of the first sphere. Enormous trusses stretched column to column. Their metal was encrusted with carbuncles. There was no sun here, no stars. Were it not for occasional blasts of fire from the smokestacks, there would have been no light in this sphere at all. As it was, the red glares leant a flickering and lurid aspect to the landscape.

  Planeswalkers did not need light. They could see heat signatures, and there were plenty of those. There were other signatures here too. Dead ahead, some five miles from where the titan engines stood, the bomb production facility lay. Each of the stone-charger shells in that factory gave off a null signature. Its mana-voided core warped natural energies. The total effect, even at five miles, was unmistakable.

  Each of us has the capacity to take twenty warheads, Urza told his immortal comrades. Gather that number, ’walk to the master columns, set the charges, and rendezvous on the third sphere.

  Taysir remarked, A simple plan—

  From a simple mind, supplied Szat, kicking a shattered mechanism with the claw of his black dragon suit.

  —but Phyrexia is not a simple place, Taysir finished. The multicolored gemstones of his suit scintillated in the eerie darkness.

  Within the pilot orb of his own titan engine, Urza made final adjustments. Small lightnings scintillated on the energy fork at the peak of the suit. This sphere is a habitat, just like the first, except here there are only predators, only mechanical watchdogs—the Devourer, the Dreadnought, the Diabolic Machine….

  Holding a rusted cog in her ivy-vined hand, Freyalise said, You seem all too impressed by those names, artificer.

  Urza’s titan engine almost shrugged. And why not? They are masterworks of design. Where Thran artifice ended, Phyrexian artifice began. Engines such as these have never been equaled on Dominaria—except in these suits, of course. And you would do well to show a little appreciation yourselves. Without these suits, the caustic atmosp
here would rip your nerves to rags.

  Daria coyly crossed the legs of her lithe and perfectly balanced titan suit—a feat none of the other engines were capable of, and said, And I suppose if we get killed, it’s our fault, not a design flaw.

  Urza peered out of the cockpit dome and gave a rare smile. And I thought you didn’t understand me. With that, he turned toward the distant bomb factory. Let’s go. Every moment we wait is another moment for the Dreadnought to find us.

  Above his piloting bulb, the energy fork flickered with an impending storm. Its blue reflection crazed the glass below. The bulb seemed a mad, glaring eye. Tripod feet crunched down atop piles of twisted scrap. Metal shrieked against metal. Two more steps, and Urza was at a full run.

  Bo Levar surged up to one side. Clumps of Urborgan mud fell from the pounding legs of his titan engine. Tatters of tobacco dropped from the joints in his hand as he clawed past a metal pillar.

  You ever done this before, Urza?

  Attack Phyrexia? he asked curtly over the noise of the engines.

  No, attack an ammo dump, Bo Levar replied idly, because you’re doing it wrong.

  The words that returned were snide. And you’re an expert because—?

  The foes of free trade are known to assemble vast arsenals. I’ve made quite a few raids in my time.

  And what am I doing wrong?

  Bo Levar reached down to the mud-encrusted knee joint of his suit and grabbed a clod. He shoved the wet stuff onto Urza’s energy fork, diffusing the lightning storm.

  First, you’ve got to remember that the ammo’s not your enemy, the guards are. You go in there blazing lightning and rockets, we’ll all be blasted to oblivion.

  Stone chargers can’t be set off that way.

  But you don’t know what other munitions can. Bo Levar let out a satisfied sigh, and the interior of his pilot bulb grew momentarily blue-gray. Windgrace and I will take point. Follow and learn.

  With a sudden burst of speed, Bo Levar outpaced Urza. Lord Windgrace’s engine bounding up beside him. On all fours, it was the fastest titan. Side by side, Bo Levar and Lord Windgrace raced toward the installation. Urza followed shortly behind, with the other six in company.