Time Streams

by J. Robert King

* * *

  In a few months, the spatial displacement capacities of the time machine had been perfected. On one journey, Karn arrived in the Adarkar Wastes, thousands of miles from Tolaria. The place was little more than a brittle blue sky above a brittle white land. Snow and ice covered most of the ground. Bare spots revealed sand that had fused together into great, thin slabs of glass, left from a long-ago battle of fire. Where Karn arrived—this time without the disconcerting fall from the sky—the land was a cracked sheet of glass, sand fused in furnacelike heat. At Malzra’s request, Karn gathered shards and brought them back with him.

  Malzra tested the samples. He declared them indeed to be from the Adarkar Wastes. He was very pleased with this result and planned to go even farther with the next trial.

  Meanwhile, the rills of temporal distortion grew worse. At first these disturbances were subtle and few, slight time-lags passing through the air like mild tremors. The frequency of the episodes gradually increased, from once a week to once a day. The severity went from mere hiccoughs to lapses that spanned four or five heartbeats. Words lagged behind lips. Music lurched up and out of tune. Carillon crews became hopelessly jangled. Goblets were overfilled or dropped. Unbound folios turned traitor in the fingers of tutors and fanned out on the floor. Flames devoured hunks of meat on the grill while neighboring steaks remained raw.

  These were minor annoyances only, especially to a creature like Karn without heartbeat or breath to get tangled up. Some of the more infirm tutors, though, had to ride out these time storms by folding to their knees and gasping for breath. As the bands of distortion deepened and grew more common, the school infirmary filled up.

  It disturbed Karn. The next time he was called for a time trial, two months later, he brought up his concerns.

  “I am not like you,” Karn noted. “That’s why you made me, because creatures like you cannot safely move through time distortions. Each time I regress through the machine, more time leaks occur, and bigger ones.”

  Master Malzra studied the golem keenly. The founder of the academy always had a strange intensity in his face and a scintillating focus in his eyes, as though he could see centuries of time crystallized into mere moments.

  “Are these…time leaks harming you?”

  Barrin glanced up from the console he prepared. He nodded approvingly at Karn, nudging him to continue.

  “Not me,” Karn replied, “but everyone else. They’re not safe. You have a lot of aging scholars here and a lot of young children. You are responsible—”

  “Have there been any serious injuries?” interrupted the master, his eyes flashing like twin gemstones.

  “Not yet, but if we continue these experiments, there will be injuries, and perhaps deaths, across the whole island.”

  Another nod came from the mage.

  Malzra blinked, astonished. “If we don’t continue these experiments, there will be injuries and deaths across the whole world. You don’t understand, Karn. You have lived mere moments. You have seen only a hundred square miles of land. I have lived millennia. I have seen worlds and worlds of worlds. There are evils at the door, Karn, evils beyond anything you can imagine. I alone know they are there and are knocking. I alone am devising a way to keep them forever out or destroy them when they get in. I alone stand between this world and utter destruction, and you come to me like a nurse-maid for these children and old dotards and demand they get goat’s milk and nap times?”

  Mage Barrin dropped his gaze, head wagging softly.

  Karn stood for some moments without responding. He believed, at long last, what Teferi had said about Malzra’s paranoia. An impulse urged Karn to confront the man with his own tortured insanity, but the past months had taught him much about dealing with these strange, irrational creatures of flesh.

  “Yes. It is a lonely, dangerous struggle.”

  Barrin looked up, impressed. “One that might, one day, kill us all,” he said in quiet reproof.

  Malzra took the comments as accord. “Good. I’m glad you both agree. Now, Karn, before you get into the machine, I want you to leave that pendant with me. It may be interfering with the regression.”

  Suspicious, Karn slowly lifted the pendant from his neck and surrendered it.

  Malzra looked it over keenly. “Where did you get it?” There was a greedy gleam in his eye.

  Karn opened his mouth to speak, but the words caught short. Malzra’s mad ravings still rang in his head. If the master started poking around in Jhoira’s room, he might find out her secret. She might be expelled—or worse.

  “I found it. It was snagged on a piece of driftwood that washed ashore.”

  “Driftwood,” Malzra said dubiously.

  “Driftwood,” Karn repeated.

  Shaking his head in irritation, Malzra said, “Into the machine then, Karn.”

  This time the regression took him to a scene of great carnage. The place was evil beyond Karn’s imagining. Men, or what had once been men, lay in broken death across the grassy ground. Some were nearly complete, marked only by telltale roses of blood on their hearts or bellies. Others were missing limbs, likely dragged away by the wild dogs that loped shamelessly among the dead. Even less remained of some warriors. They had been torn in half by unimaginably sharp blades or blasted into fragments by fireballs. Smoldering war machines hulked on the horizon. The smell of waste, smoke, offal, maggots, and disease filled the air.

  Surely this devastation has been caused by the horrors and evils Malzra spoke of, the silver man thought.

  Karn had never felt sick before, but now his silver bulk quivered as with a tarnish that reached to the very core of him. He had been asked to gather some sign of his journey, but he could not bring himself to pry a sword from the hand of a fallen man or pull loose the helm that had failed to save a life. Instead Karn found a single shield, lying alone and bloodless on a windblown tuft of glass. This he lifted and held against him, waiting miserably for the master to recall him.

  When Karn returned, he sorrowfully presented the shield to Malzra. The master identified it—a bracer from New Argive. To the silver man’s description of the battle, Malzra merely nodded grimly—a battle had occurred in that spot only two days before. Karn had regressed only a day and a half. The master was frustrated and angry. He brusquely handed the pendant back.

  “If these are the atrocities you spoke of, Master Malzra,” Karn said solemnly as he donned the amulet, “I understand now why you fight so hard.”

  Malzra’s smile—an unusual sight—was sardonic. “These atrocities are nothing, the result of human hatreds. What I fight is the hatred of demons.”

  Monologue

  Sometimes I forget all Urza has seen, all he has done.

  The silver man returned from New Argive. We debriefed him and shut down the laboratory. That night, during the reading session in Urza’s study, he let the volume he was reading slide down to lie open on his lap. He stared straight ahead for some time. I lowered my book as well and waited. Urza’s eyes had that faraway look, and I glimpsed the halves of the Mightstone and Weakstone showing through. Beyond the high windows, sea winds argued among the palms.

  “I was fighting a whole world, not just Gix, but a whole world,” he murmured.

  Cautiously, I ventured, “Fighting a whole world?”

  In Phyrexia. I had gone to fight Gix, but there was a whole world of Gixes. Demons, witch engines, dragon engines, the living dead and the dead living. And at the heart of it all, a god. A dark, mad god.”

  I wryly imagined the same description coming from an invader of Tolaria.

  “I fought to destroy a whole world, but Xantcha—she fought only to regain her heart.”

  I drew a deep breath of sea wind. “Yes. That one stone was a whole world to her. It is a whole world to Karn.”

  A gleam of sudden realization shone in Urza’s dark, ancient eyes.

 
“That’s why they act the way they do.”

  “Who?”

  “The students, the tutors—even you and Karn. Every one of you is defending your own heart, your own world.”

  He is not mad, not wholly. He is ancient and inhuman, transformed by the millennia, but he is not wholly mad.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Don’t you remember how it feels? It is a lonely, dangerous struggle, one that will, one day, kill us all.”

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  Teferi sat on a wind-blasted crest of rock above the restless nighttime sea.

  It had been quite a feat, reaching this point. Jhoira was lithe and athletic. She had moved quickly and soundlessly from her room after lantern-call that evening. Despite Teferi’s invisibility enchantment, she sensed she was being followed. Twice, as she made her way through the empty corridors of the school, she looked back. The first time, Teferi fetched up against a recessed doorway to the forge room. The handle of the door rattled. She peered a long time back in the feverish night, and Teferi dared not breathe. When at last he looked again, she was already gone. He caught up to her in the Hall of Artifact Creatures—a museum where Malzra placed important but obsolete inventions. The place was unnerving enough by day. It was filled with statuesque creatures of metal plate and guy wire, each posed with limbs extended as if beseeching the viewer to reactivate them. At night the museum was downright frightening. Wiry, dog-headed Yotian warriors menaced in their crouches. Backward-kneed su-chi lifters seemed behemoths from some far-off world. At the far side of the mechanical menagerie, Jhoira was no more than a fleeting triangle of cloth. The door she exited led to the western laboratory—a half-used structure that was beastly hot in the height of summer and dank in the drear of winter.

  Once again, he almost lost her. There was no sign of her in the lab. He cast a spell, seeing the fading heat of her footprints on the floor. They disappeared as he followed. She’d gotten away. Teferi stepped on a slightly skewed grating. It rang with possibilities. He knelt and stared down into the darkness below the grate. Jhoira’s tampering had been evident even in the dark—at least to a mage’s eye—and the trick of her specially engineered bolts took only minutes to divine. After that, it was easy enough reach the wall. He saw her slip from the channel as the guards overhead cursed some nocturnal bird. Teferi conjured a real bird to do the task for him, a skycaptain that nearly spooked the men into jumping. With the bird and his invisibility, the young prodigy followed with ease.

  Jhoira was not so cautious thereafter. Perhaps, once away from the school, she thought no one would be around to detect her. Perhaps, once near her hideaway, she was too eager to be careful. Even in the patchy light of the Glimmer Moon, Teferi made good time through the steaming woods and to this spot, just above the sea, just beside the mouth of the dimly flickering cave. He dispelled his invisibility, drew a deep breath, and with a smug smile, started into the niche. He stopped just in time.

  Teferi saw what lay within, who lay within.

  In a fit of disgust, he withdrew, unable to bear any more. He’d expected to find something to use against Jhoira, something with which he could extort a kiss from her, perhaps—but not this, another man. Even if Teferi mentioned that he knew her secret, he could not win her heart with it. She would only hate him all the more. He sat there while the sea toiled ceaselessly below and the wind dug its claws into the clouds overhead. He rose and headed back toward the academy, his mind abuzz with questions.

  As he pushed past the pawing undergrowth of the western isle, a new thought occurred to him: it was possible there were certain things in life that could not be attained through manipulation and trickery. Nothing he had done had won Jhoira to him. No amount of misdirection, cajoling, humiliation, artifice, boasting, or innuendo had convinced her he was great. Teferi was honestly confused. He had never met a person so resistant to the obvious truth of his supremacy. She couldn’t see any of his overwhelming virtues, determined to focus on the difference in their ages. “Grow up,” was all she could ever think to say to him. He was growing up. How could he grow up faster? He didn’t have a time machine….

  That’s when he felt the hand seize his shoulder and thrust his face to the ground.

  * * *

  “Teferi knows about Kerrick,” Karn said to Jhoira. The silver man hunched just outside the doorway in the nervous light of morning.

  Drowsy, Jhoira blinked at her friend. She had gotten back only an hour before, during the sunrise change of the guard.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They caught him outside the academy this morning. He was coming back from the western shore.”

  Her stomach sinking, Jhoira motioned Karn into the room and closed the door behind him. She ran her hand through her tousled hair.

  “Now, what’s all this about?”

  “Teferi’s been watching you,” Karn said with quiet intensity. “He probably followed you. They caught him on his way back from the shore. He must have seen—”

  “Who caught him?” Jhoira interrupted.

  “The guards from the western wall. One had seen something rustling in the jungle when he left. The guard followed until she lost the trail but waited on the path for him to return. They interrogated him for hours—they’re angry about your mechanical birds and think Teferi conjured them. They got nothing out of him, though, not even the route you used out of the school, and half an hour ago they turned him over to Master Malzra himself.”

  Shaking her head in irritation, Jhoira swung wide the bone-inlaid doors of her wardrobe and rifled among her clothes. She chose her most formal white cloak, trimmed in gold piping, and slipped it on. Shedding her nightclothes beneath the robe, she selected a belt of gold rope and cinched it angrily around her waist.

  “What are you going to do?” Karn asked, stunned.

  “I’m going to go defend myself.”

  “Teferi hasn’t said anything yet,” Karn pointed out.

  “Teferi?” Jhoira asked, angry. “He’s holding out for the right price. He’ll sell me out as soon as he has Master Malzra twisted around his finger.” She shook her head again. “I want to beat him to the punch. I want to confess what I’ve done, so at least I have honesty on my side.” With a final snort of surrender, she turned and bent over her cot, her hands drawing up the covers over a lump Karn had not noticed before. “Let’s go.”

  As the two turned to leave, Karn glanced back at the cot, where he saw the curly golden hair of Kerrick.

  * * *

  Master Malzra was in a state. His face, always alight with a golden inner glow, was bright as a candle. His eyes seemed to cast twin red beams of hellfire. He paced, his blue robes crinkling all about him. In the dim light of the small study he was enormous and powerful, as though he wore one of the suits of power armor he had on display in the Hall of Artifact Creatures.

  Before him, fourteen-year-old Teferi looked as small as a sparrow.

  “Who are you, then? What are you? A spy? You’re too young to be a Phyrexian sleeper. You don’t smell like glistening oil. But you are smart and ambitious and incorrigible, just the sort of person the Phyrexians choose. What were you doing beyond the wall? Who were you meeting? Phyrexian negators?”

  Teferi kept his eyes averted on the blackwood tabletop where he sat. “I don’t even know what you mean by a Fire Ex—Fry Egg—Friar Ecclesian—”

  “Don’t mock me!” demanded Malzra, pounding the tabletop with his fist.

  Tapping an inner reserve of strength, Teferi raised his eyes to meet the glowing orbs of the master, which looked like the multi-faceted eyes of an insect. Teferi drew a deep breath and roared right back at the man, “You’re mad, Master. Everyone knows it. You’re also a genius, of course. None of us would come here to study if we didn’t know that. You know more about artifice and magic than any man for millennia, but you are mad. Fire-Eaters and Fanatics, Demons an
d Dog-Faced Men, Invaders and Conspirators and Spies—the only invaders that ever come to this island are fish stupid enough to get stranded by the tide or seagulls who have lost their sense of direction and flown away from everything and into nothing. No one wants to get in here, Master Malzra, but I can think of about two hundred students and forty scholars who want out, and that’s what I was doing beyond the wall, believe it or not.”

  In the sudden, stunned silence, a knock came at the door. Mage Barrin shifted from the shadows and went to the door.

  While the latch sounded and hushed voices spoke, Teferi and Malzra stared into each other’s eyes. There was recognition between them. Despite the vast difference in their ages, the two knew in that moment that they were more alike than different—brilliant, driven, selfish, unstoppable, obsessive, irrepressible, and as deeply flawed as they were gifted. But there was something more to it, an undeniable spark of greatness—unmistakable among those blessed, or cursed, by it.

  Malzra’s eyes intensified. Teferi felt a presence in his mind. Sinuous as a snake, Malzra slithered through his thoughts. The master sniffed among skittering memories, snapped and swallowed them. Fear like a mouse went first into that maw, then jealousy and timid insecurity. The master’s mind snapped down images of the forest and the Glimmer Moon. The truth lay beyond. It smelled sour and strong. Malzra wound forward. In moments, he would know. He would know.

  Teferi’s eyes intensified, too. A cat came prowling among his thoughts—righteous indignation and pride—and it leaped on the snaking mind of Malzra. Fangs and claws, spitting and hissing, fur and scale, they fought in the young man’s mind. The battle was ferocious, though only their beaming eyes gave outward sign of it.

  Barrin discreetly cleared his throat to break the tension. “Jhoira and Karn are here.”

  “Another time,” Malzra growled.

  “She says she’s come to confess,” Barrin said, gesturing the young woman and the silver man into the small study.