Planeshift

by J. Robert King

  It was only a mile away now, a roofless assemblage of demonic machines—toothy cranes, cobweb gantries, smelting buckets, smoking furnaces, rivers of molten metal, mounds of shattered crystal, and droves of artifact drones.

  In their midst stood row on gleaming row of stone chargers, the most powerful bombs developed by the Thran. One stone charger could annihilate a huge city, scouring soil to bedrock and irradiating a hundred miles with deadly concentrations of white mana. It was rumored that Yawgmoth had used such devices to eradicate his rivals in the Thran-Phyrexian war. Now, those bombs would be used on Yawgmoth’s own world.

  The drones are no concern, Bo Levar advised. It’s whatever watchdog guards the drones—

  A huge and toothy mechanism rose suddenly before the titan engines. It had lain dormant amid piles of scrap, waiting for intruders. Now the thing lunged up from its well of metal. It had the configuration of a sea urchin, rods bristling outward from a central body. Each rod was tipped in a pair of jagged bear-trap mechanisms, ratcheted open. The vicious things swung out to clamp onto Bo Levar and Lord Windgrace

  Without breaking stride, Bo Levar said, Here’s what I meant. He leaped over the snapping jaws of the Phyrexian defender. Lord Windgrace did likewise. Both titans sailed through the smoky air.

  Eschewing the advice of his lessers, Urza halted before the monstrous machine and loosed a pair of rockets. They surged from their wrist housings and corkscrewed toward the beast. The first missile struck a pair of snapping jaws and deflected upward to explode in clear air. The other passed perniciously through the forest of rods, screamed out over the intervening space, and struck a blast furnace. The detonation cracked away metal and brick, loosing a great river of molten steel. It gushed across an adjacent array of stone chargers, liquefying their shells and rendering them useless.

  Clucking quietly in his piloting bulb, Bo Levar said, That wasn’t so well done. With a nonchalant kick, he struck the back side of the defender mechanism, where none of the rods jutted. Like an urchin pried from its rock, the thing folded to one side.

  Windgrace administered the killing blow. Blue motes swarmed from the eyes of titan suit, struck the drive mechanism before him, and liquefied it. The mouths snapped a few more times spasmodically before they lay still.

  Brushing the hands of his titan suit, Bo Levar said, Let’s see what they’ve got for us next.

  Look out! sent Kristina. Her weighty engine hurtled through the air above the destroyed mechanism and the other titans. She came down on the next guardian.

  This monster was more muscle than machine. Like the dragon engines of the first sphere, its flesh was living metal. Unlike them, the thousand-legged giant millipede was too ferocious a predator to have free run of the first sphere. Its fang-studded mouth reared into the air.

  Kristina ducked beneath the striking head. The titanium toes of her engine cracked into the back of the great beast. A quick spell made those toes razor sharp. Feet slid between folding plates of metal. With similarly honed fingers, Kristina crouched and grabbed handholds. She heaved, ripping open the back of the monster. Sparks spewed from ruptured wires. Pneumatic muscles groaned as she yanked again. Steel cables separated beneath the millipede’s plates. Cords lashed.

  Kristina was dauntless. She plunged her hands deeper. Titanic fingers grasped adjacent ribs along the millipede’s torso. Spells heightened the tensile strength of her own gears. She pulled. With a pop and an acrid gray cloud of smoke, the nerve center of the beast separated. Severed halves of the monster flopped in biomechanical agony. Kristina continued her grim work until she had completely ripped it in two.

  The joints of her suit steamed with exertion. Kristina rose triumphantly in the breach of the worm.

  Commodore Guff arrived, his titan engine striking a dignified pose. Through a haze of smoke, he peered out of the pilot capsule and stared appreciatively at Kristina’s handiwork.

  By Belinus! You’ve got a way with bugs. We’d had critters like that back when I was a kid, and we ripped ’em in half too, but just to watch ’em grow a new mouth on both ends—

  Kristina was too slow—they all were too slow. Both new mouths lunged for her engine. It seemed Yawgmoth had known the signature defense of living millipedes. The first mouth bit straight through Kristina’s pilot bulb. Glass shattered and metal sheered. The bulb crushed like an egg. The second fastened onto the torso of her engine. In dynamic opposition, the two mouths ripped the head away from the body.

  Had she ’walked? Had she ’walked? came Taysir’s anxious thoughts.

  With an animal shriek, Szat hurled himself between the two halves of the beast. He had learned from Kristina’s mistake. You couldn’t tear this beast apart. You had to kill it from the inside out.

  Swallowing, one mouth lunged for Szat. He caught its jaws and roared, pouring fire down the metal throat. While the flame went from red-hot to white-hot, Szat also sent a cloud of corruption down the beast’s gullet. Millipede teeth wept like candles. Metallic flesh melted from metallic bones. Neural networks turned to sparking goo. Szat’s attack killed the brain of the thing. It went limp, settling like a long, deflated balloon.

  Hurling the dead creature down, Szat whirled to attack the other millipede at his back.

  He breathed fire. He poured out corruption.

  But it wasn’t the other half of the millipede that he slew. It was already dead, smoldering in blackness beneath the angry figure of Kristina. She had planeswalked away from her titan engine just as it was dismantled. Reappearing aback the second beast, she marshaled her full arsenal of planeswalking spells. The monster lay in dead runnels beneath her, but every last spell was gone from the woman. Battling the caustic air all around her, she had no time to ’walk again.

  Szat’s firestorm dismantled her. Skin, skull, and brain—brain was the thing, whether with a millipede or a planeswalker. If she couldn’t think, she couldn’t step away from danger, couldn’t reassemble a new body. She was gone. Obliterated. An eternity over in an instant.

  Szat stood gaping while another beast attacked. This was no Phyrexian but a more deadly mechanism—Taysir, onetime love of Kristina. He fell like a mountain on his fellow titan, hurling him to the scrap heap and landing on top.

  You careless bastard! You damned vicious monster!

  Taysir was proving himself little better, furiously battering the titan engine of his foe. It was his mistake. Szat was not helpless like Kristina.

  Flipping over, Szat hurled Taysir’s titan off him. She killed herself. She got in my way.

  Both titans were knocked back by a sudden presence between them—Urza Planeswalker in the largest, most powerful engine of all. Hold, both of you. Have you forgotten our mission?

  Taysir’s suit flashed in rage. Have you forgotten Kristina?

  Szat sneered. Urza always forgets the dead.

  You’re implicated in this, Urza. You’re the one who insisted on bringing this…this…murdering monster. Maybe you needed somebody else who would love this place, Taysir roared.

  Urza stared from his pilot bulb with bald incomprehension. What are you talking about?

  Oh, don’t kid yourself, Urza. You love Phyrexia like a man loves a woman. You love her lines. You love her machines. You love the perfection of design through constant war. You don’t want to blow up this place. You want to take it as your own!

  Enough! Urza shouted. Enough! This was an accident. It shows how vulnerable we all are without our titan suits. Keep them on. In the meantime, I will prove to you what little love I have for this world. On! On to the stone-chargers!

  The three had been so immersed in their argument that they hadn’t realized the other five had fought on toward the munitions factory. Bo Levar and Commodore Guff led the charge.

  Have you seen this one? Bo Levar asked as new defenders rose in a swarm about him. The mechanisms had the configuration of tadpoles, though inst
ead of tails they had single lashing wings. Their main body consisted of gnashing teeth. Bo Levar easily grabbed the wing of the first creature and swung it in an arc before him. The titan engine’s glove glowed with a blue radiance that proliferated out across the body of the defender. It seemed to draw the other defenders magnetically inward. They converged around the first beast. The chattering jaws chewed each other to shreds of metal. Twenty in one blow.

  I’ll be jiggered, said Commodore Guff in genuine amazement. Combining martial sciences with magical ones….

  The wave of the future, Bo Levar said. You watch. Once this business is done, this kind of stuff will be huge.

  Let me have a go, the commodore replied. He grappled a huge, spidery construct that rose in his path. Various colors of magic flashed from the titan and raced along the rodlike legs of the beast. The first spell managed to produce an odd odor, the second to cover the spider in rampant ivy, and the third to send it floating away toward the smoggy ceiling of the sphere. Ah, perfect. I’ll be happy to write about that one.

  As Bo Levar and Commodore Guff blazed the trail forward, the other titans loped afterward, Urza last of all.

  Taysir had sounded so like Barrin. The mage master had once joked that the only difference between Urza and Yawgmoth was a four-thousand-year head start. Such comments were not helpful, and Barrin had been full of them.

  Taysir and Szat had been wrong. Urza didn’t forget the dead. Every day since he’d killed his brother Mishra—it was a mercy killing, yes—Urza remembered him. He remembered Xantcha and Ratepe, who had been Mishra for him and had helped him reclaim his mind. He remembered the students and scholars of the first Tolaria and of New Tolaria. Most of all, though, he remembered Barrin. That was a loss Urza would never recover from. Barrin, Xantcha, Mishra—they had all become a single beloved other lost for all time. Urza remembered all too well.

  His dark reverie was broken by a bright vision. He and his team had reached the ammunitions factory. Before them, row on glorious, gleaming row, stretched thousands of stone-charger shells.

  Beautiful.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Twice Dead

  His own warriors had thought him insane. They had wondered how Agnate could ally himself with a lich lord and march a division down into the world of the dead. They hadn’t seen the virtue in Dralnu’s vile breast, hadn’t heard the words of life in a mouth that smelled of death.

  The doubters were proven wrong. In sunlight and cypress break, they saw the truth. The five hundred troops Agnate had led down among the dead had emerged again, accompanied by a hundredfold allies. Agnate’s forces now marched with an undead army of fifty thousand. Dralnu had taken Thaddeus’s portion. His ghouls and skeletons and zombies and revenants had replaced Thaddeus’s warriors. At last, Agnate had a counterpart toward whom to drive in the deadly Metathran pincer.

  How right he had been. How perfect this felt, to fight so.

  Reaping Phyrexians like grass, Agnate and his vanguard topped a low ridge. Beyond it opened a wide mudflat beside the sea. Phyrexians in their multitude crowded the spot. They had nowhere left to flee. Voda warriors tore apart any who sought escape in the water. It was a fitting trap for the arrogant beasts.

  Agnate peered down the ridge. It swept in a long curve around the flat. On the opposite side, a mere mile distant, appeared Lich Lord Dralnu with his contingent. The timing could not have been more precise if it had been Thaddeus who stood there. It was time for the pincers to close. Agnate gave a sharp hand signal. As one his Metathran and the armies of the dead descended the ridge at a charge. They crashed into the mud-caked Phyrexians.

  There was pure joy in this. Agnate’s battle-axe batted away a bloodstock’s raking claw. The Phyrexian centaur reeled back. Following through, Agnate brought the axe downward to sever the beast’s forelimbs. The bloodstock fell before him but still clawed. Agnate’s axe ended its struggles.

  Agnate stared down at the split head of the thing. He had delivered Thaddeus’s mercy blow the same way and for the same reason. The work of vat priests was irreversible and unbearable. Agnate’s axe was not a destroyer but a liberator.

  That was the joy of this battle. It was not war but salvation. He was not slaying souls but freeing them. When he and Dralnu were done this day, even the mud would be clean.

  Such are the fleeting fancies of warriors between axe blows.

  Agnate’s weapon swung toward a Phyrexian crab. On a tripod of bladelike legs, the mechanism had only one vulnerable spot—a trio of fleshy heads grafted to its back. The heads were fused in back, three sets of eyes staring in three separate directions. Agnate’s axe fell. It bisected two of the heads, but the third lived. One of the thing’s claws flung back the axe. Another grabbed Agnate’s free hand. The last gripped his weapon arm, dragging him toward pelvic scythes.

  Agnate had one option. Instead of struggling to break free, he hurled himself inward and head-butted the remaining face. It collapsed like an egg. Agnate reared, his head flinging glistening-oil, but he could not break free. He butted the creature again. This time, something gray mixed with the gold, and the creature slumped.

  Agnate escaped. He wiped oil back along his pate.

  To either side, Metathran troops formed a blue wave across the mudflats. Where their tide rolled, monsters fell. In muddy graves and thrashing seas, Phyrexians lay dead.

  Agnate’s axe sang above the heads of his foes. Here it clove the skull-shield of a scuta. There it chopped through the waist of a Phyrexian trooper. It bashed back claws and bashed in teeth. It liberated scores of souls from the Phyrexian prisons they called their bodies.

  Then blade met blade. Agnate’s axe rebounded. A Phyrexian slasher advanced to kill him. He couldn’t do likewise. There were no soft spots on the artifact engine. It was all razor edges. Three knifelike legs supported a body that bristled with whirling steel.

  Agnate backed away, swinging. His weapon only clanged on the foremost scythe. The machine scuttled toward him. Agnate swept his axe downward but nearly tripped over a dead body. The axe bit deep in the mud and was mired. He yanked on it. The machine leaped at him. Agnate released the weapon and retreated beyond the corpse.

  Reaching down, he lifted the body he had stumbled over—a Phyrexian trooper. Hoisting it overhead, Agnate hurled it down on the slasher. Its main blade impaled the corpse, while side blades shredded the body. The Phyrexian’s weight shoved the slasher’s legs into the mud. Hefting another corpse, Agnate flung it down atop the machine. Deeper the thing went. Two more bodies, and the slasher was hopelessly stuck.

  He had to laugh.

  Striding past the machine, Agnate worked his axe free from the mud. The battle raged ahead of him. Only a narrow wedge of monsters remained between the closing halves of the army. Eager to deal the final blows, the Metathran commander leaped back into battle.

  He reached the front lines at a run, axe lifted high. It came down with a profound stroke that entered the crown of a bloodstock’s head and exited its belly. The cloven monster fell before him as if in a deep bow. Agnate’s axe decapitated a monster beyond—a ghoul with dripping sores across its flesh. Like a man hewing wood, Agnate swung again, slaying a zombie in rotten rags. He raised his blade and began another attack, but something stayed his hand.

  Thaddeus. No, not Thaddeus—Lich Lord Dralnu.

  The necromancer gripped Agnate’s forearm in an implacably powerful claw. His mouth opened, and words that smelled faintly of rot emerged.

  “Hold, Agnate. You do not slay Phyrexians but your own troops. The foes are gone. The day is won.”

  Beneath a brow that streamed sweat, Agnate blinked. “What?”

  “The day is won,” said the lich lord simply.

  Agnate lowered his axe and took a deep breath. He looked at the zombie and ghoul he had destroyed. “I did not realize—”

  “War has its casualties. I have lost ten
thousand in this fight, and you perhaps five thousand.”

  “That many?” Agnate wondered aloud. He glanced back at the battlefield. Most of the corpses there were Phyrexian, but there were many Metathran among them. The thought grieved Agnate. The bloodlust of battle was draining from him. “We’ve slain many Phyrexians today. I would guess thirty to forty thousand. The five and ten thousand that we lost died valiantly.”

  “Oh, your troops are not lost, my friend,” Lich Lord Dralnu said. A strange smile showed on his face. “Not while we are allies. I will merely raise them to fight again. They are perhaps lost to you, but they are gained by me. That way, each of us has lost only five thousand.”

  Agnate nodded, feeling vaguely unsettled. “Will you raise also these?” He pointed to the zombie and ghoul. “And your other slain troops?”

  “No. The twice dead can never rise again.”

  * * *

  —

  Bone fires burned high along the mudflats that night.

  Fatigued Metathran and indefatigable undead had worked side by side to drag the corpses into funereal pyres—nine for the Phyrexians and five for undead. The latter had been laid out ceremonially on wood soaked in glistening-oil. The former had been tossed in heaps on the mud. Even now, the monsters’ bodies burned with alacrity. Fires melted the metals within them. Hearts sizzled and burst in sudden gushes of oil that made flames leap and pop. The undead gave their bodies to the wind more gradually. Lying decorously on their pyres, they surrendered to flame. It licked away their hair and skin and muscle down to bone.

  Not so the Metathran dead. On litters fashioned from nearby trees, they rode toward Vhelnish. Lich Lord Dralnu went with them, eager to restore them to life.