Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  With a growl and a heave, the beast worked the mechanism at Karn’s throat and flung back his skull. Karn could see nothing more, could move little, his limbs jangling around him, but he could feel the spike-tipped fingers slide in around the silver case where his powerstone lay. One yank and the whole assembly would spill forth, and Karn’s life would be gone—a fragile crystal clutched in the claw of a Phyrexian killer.

  It paused, its fingers catching first upon a small trinket hanging about the golem’s neck, the Viashino medallion.

  The beast lifted it, looked it over, and softly purred a single word: “Thran.”

  Karn spoke a different word: “Jhoira.”

  Gathering together his shattered will, Karn caught up the Thran-metal trinket, broke the silver chain that bound it, and impelled the bauble into the Phyrexian’s skull. A gush of hot oil-blood streamed over him.

  Screaming, the creature fell back. Karn managed to knock closed his skull-piece and felt his power, his will, reassembling from fragments on the floor. In the next instant, he rose above the crouching killer, the Viashino trinket half-sunk in its frontal lobe. He flung the beast to the ground, and with one stomp of his massive foot, reduced the thing’s head into an oily mass of slumped skin, brain ooze, and bone meal. The body trembled for a few moments afterward, but Karn kicked the sloppy corpse aside and knelt beside his fallen friend.

  Dead. Jhoira was dead. The rage Karn had felt at his discovery melted now into anguish and sorrow. The silver man crumpled before her. This ached worse than a red-hot frame or a skull-plate peeled back like the rind of a melon.

  “They are everywhere,” came a stern voice from the doorway. “They are killing everyone. Barrin is dead already. Teferi too.”

  Karn looked up to see Master Malzra arrayed in battle armor that made him look not unlike the machine-implanted Phyrexian.

  “It is too late to stop them. We mustn’t thrash at the branches of evil, but chop the root. I will send you back. This whole attack can be averted. Return in time. Return forty-eight hours. Intercept Kerrick and kill him before he can relay the plans. I will guard the machine and fight all corners. I must have Mage Master Barrin back. Let the portal destroy itself, if it must. Let your own frame melt into nothing, but stop Kerrick and his negators.”

  * * *

  If I kill him, thought Karn as the smoky beam of the portal danced around him, if I even delay him, detain him, Jhoira will live again.

  Beyond the fitful circling of that red ray, Master Malzra worked feverishly at both consoles, his associate lying dead somewhere in the ravaged school.

  If I kill Kerrick, thought Karn, it all will be as it was.

  Even then, a brace of negators burst through the door. Huge and trussed with steel armor, much like the Phyrexian Karn had already slain, each of these creatures was unique. One had a lupine head and limbs, though its shoulders and torso were human—or once were before they had been pierced in a thousand places by seeking tubes and conduits. Another was a lurching ogre with massive, infolded features, deep, malevolent eyes, and arms as huge as other men’s legs. A third was lithe and quick and spidery. These three emerged among spinning shards of the shattered door and plunged toward Malzra.

  Karn staggered, almost lurching from the light to drive back the creatures.

  Without even looking up from the machinery around him, Malzra lifted a hand and sent out a shocking blast. Three bolts separated from the main surge and caught the monsters mid-chest. Lightning blasted holes where the hearts would have been in humans and raced in crackling fury across the steel frames. Eyes lit from within. Fangs danced with sparks. Muscles glowed eerily where neurons ran, but still the Phyrexians converged.

  For the next sorcery, Malzra did not even raise his hand. The spell blossomed full-formed from his mind even as his fingers danced across the consoles. Each of the three creatures abruptly froze, midstride, and fell to the floor, shattering like black ice.

  Karn saw no more. In the next moment, all the rest of the world froze. It stood for a shuddering instant, as if on the verge of cracking, and then time began scrolling backward. Broken bits of Phyrexian slid together on the floor and rose up, assembling themselves in midair and retreating toward the door. A gathering spell formed flesh from ribbons of smoke and thrust it into the holes in the creatures’ breasts. They obligingly fled outward, rebuilding the door from wood fragments before they departed.

  And then time scrolled faster still. The dancing beam shrieked in its frenetic spinning. The world jittered and shook. Master Malzra had harnessed the full power of the device, of its four vectors and its sea-cave turbines, to power this regression. Karn would likely not survive this journey, and even if he did, the machine might not remain to bring him back. But Jhoira would survive, and that would be enough. Jhoira and Teferi, Barrin and the school. If saving them meant losing himself, Karn did not mind. Better to end that way than as a statue in the Hall of Artifact Creatures.

  Morning brought darkness to the world; Kerrick entered the laboratory on his last visit and was gone; and evening brought light. Karn waited anxiously through another day and into the morning-twilight beyond. He was already quite hot, his bulk steaming and his plates grinding against each other in expansion. Night deepened. The regression slowed. The light faltered. Karn clenched his hands at his sides and felt the strange, very human impulse to pray—to what god he did not know, perhaps to the time machine itself.

  With a light more beautiful than any true dawn, the laboratory door cracked slowly open, and the gray corridor glimmered beyond.

  Karn heaved himself from the dissipating pool of light, his own silver bulk glowing a dull red to match that color of the beam. Without pause, he raced toward the now-closing door, grappled the handle, and flung it wide. He barged into the hall just behind the golden-headed Phyrexian sleeper.

  Kerrick whirled when he heard the door bang raggedly against the corridor wall. Though Karn was still out of phase, his superheated shell sent wisps of smoke into the air in an aura around his body, and Kerrick saw the shape of the void within.

  He turned and bolted. Karn followed. He had not been built for speed, and running taxed his frame. Kerrick darted ahead down the corridor, quickly pulling away.

  Perhaps another regression, Karn thought desperately. Perhaps I should be withdrawn for another regression—except the machine may destroy itself to accomplish this one.

  Karn was not as fast as the Phyrexian, but he knew the academy and knew where Kerrick headed. Launching himself down a side passage, Karn reached the Hall of Artifact Creatures. He entered quickly, closing and bolting the door behind him.

  Karn stalked past deactivated creatures two and three times his size—mechanical mammoths, rovers with the form of steel crickets, spidery devices with hands at the end of each leg. The killer was there, too. Kerrick had entered the chamber from the far end, and he stalked cautiously forward. He was on his way to the west laboratories and would need to pass through the door behind Karn. The silver man eased himself onto a nearby platform and crouched beside the metal skeleton of a clay warrior. There, camouflaged among dead metal creatures, he waited.

  Kerrick came. Cautious and quick, he came. A sneer jagged across his lip as he set his hand on the doorknob and pulled, certain he had evaded his pursuer.

  Karn fell upon him.

  There is an unmistakable sound when bones—whether human or Phyrexian—snap. Kerrick’s lower right leg folded below the knee. Shrieking in agony, the man crumpled to the floor.

  It was a piteous noise, and Karn, fists balled and ready to finish the man, hesitated. Perhaps breaking Kerrick’s leg was enough to stop him, to keep him from escaping the wall and meeting with the Phyrexians. He would be found here by the guard and recognized as a spy. He would be dealt with harshly by Malzra and Barrin, and perhaps they would learn from him who he was, and how many Phyrexians massed, and where. To kill this
man insured the Phyrexians would come again, another day, but leaving him alive to interrogate—

  Still only half-visible in his phase shift, Karn hoisted the angry man to his shoulders and marched past rank upon rank of artifact creatures. Kerrick arched away from the silver man’s burning skin and gave little cries of agony. Prisoner and captor reached the far doorway, passed through it, and started down the corridor beyond.

  “I have a spy, a Phyrexian spy!” Karn called out. “Guards! Mage Barrin! Master Malzra!”

  Before an answer came, every particle of Karn’s being was seized by Malzra’s future hand. The machine was drawing him back. There was something different about this summons—its tearing insistence. The silver man jolted under the assault and almost fell. He clutched his captive all the tighter. His frame became griddle-hot. Kerrick thrashed and wriggled. The long dark hallway whirled.

  With a shriek of fury, the Phyrexian rammed his fingers beneath Karn’s jaw, fumbling for the release mechanism. In reflex, Karn seized the man’s hand and flung it violently away. The wrenching movement hurled Kerrick free. He landed, a leg-broken mass, on the stony floor of the hall. Karn staggered back.

  The red beam came, a chaotic, stabbing light. The hallway began to dissolve. Karn swung a massive hand toward the Phyrexian, but his fingers closed on wheeling chaos and nothing. Shards of reality slid past in mirror moments. Karn plunged through raveling time.

  Something was wrong with the machine, terribly wrong.

  The lashing pulses of temporal energy formed a vortex around him, drawing him downward, forward, toward the dark future and its disintegrating mechanism.

  The laboratory took fitful shape outside the cone. It winked into and out of existence. A tumbling chaos of red forms blossomed around Karn. For a second time that day, he felt the impulse to pray. The laboratory returned. Malzra’s consoles flickered through a shroud of rolling smoke. The master and Barrin labored mightily at the sparking controls. Over Karn’s head the time machine swayed ominously, its side panels bleeding soot into the air.

  It was disintegrating.

  The light orb at the base of the device cracked, sending jabbing rays out in all directions. Where red beams struck, walls turned to dust, machines to slag. Each ray carved a jagged rent in whatever it hit, tearing through the laboratory and the corridors beyond, through the dormitories and the wall itself, reaching out to rend all of Tolaria.

  Karn stood in the center of it, shielded beneath the coruscating cone of light.

  Then came the explosion.

  Red was suddenly gone, red and all other color and all darkness. There was only light in that moment, light like the center of the sun. It came with a fragile shattering sound, as though a crystal had been sundered. A bell-tone keen followed and what might have been thunder if a lightning bolt could be large enough to encompass a whole world.

  The air was solid for a moment, an amalgam of gas and energy, then rushed outward. Walls were gone, just as color was before. The rushing inferno rolled out in an incandescent ring from where Karn stood, pulverizing stone and steel and glass. Farther out, the ring devolved into lines of blast as raw energy gathered in radiating avenues. The holocaust obliterated whole sections of the academy and scoured the earth down to bedrock. Other areas remained untouched. Buildings were torn in cross section.

  The shock wave pelted outward. It bore a storm of shattered stone and rent metal that consumed with a million gnashing teeth anything it struck. Millennial trees toppled. Stony pinnacles were eaten right through. Green leaves burst into flame. Clouds of dust and ash boiled up from the shuddering forests.

  The blaze reached even the sea, and in mile-long arms it boiled water to a depth of five fathoms. It reached to the clouds overhead, flinging some aside and bringing fiery hail from others. It shook the oceans, awakening tidal waves that destroyed coastal villages two hundred miles distant. It was a blast like none felt on Tolaria since the dark days of Argoth.

  It was a blast awoken by the same follies of the same man.

  * * *

  Urza stood beyond it all. He had been beside the time portal in the white-hot instant that it exploded. It had taken every ounce of his metaphysical might to gather the particles of his being against the massive waves of power. As mote by mote of matter was blown away from him, he slowly became a being of pure energy. He resolved himself again and again in the first heartbeat of that hailing storm.

  In the second heartbeat, he risked it all by reaching out beyond the rolling envelope of destruction and snatching them up, one by one—perhaps not his best and brightest, but those nearest, those who could be saved. Mage Master Barrin was first (yes, the silver man, Karn, had done what he was sent to do, had averted the Phyrexian invasion, though even the facts of that other time loop were as difficult to hold to and reassemble as Urza’s own body was), then five other scholars, and eight students. He whisked them up with him in a sudden, spontaneous planeswalk. They would not survive the journey in human form, he knew, and took a moment to transform them all into stone. It could be undone later, when there was time, when there was strength….

  Ravening beams streamed past Urza and his company of statues. The death throes of his latest dynamo flung out shrapnel of every conceivable thing. Metal and stone and bone and brain and even mind tore repeatedly through them. Urza held fast against the storm. He rose. He took the others with him.

  Now they were…where?

  The hillside was sunny and green. A gentle, heather-smelling wind strolled easily past the fourteen statues. Urza had saved himself and fourteen others—which meant that more than two hundred were left to die. He had saved himself and Barrin and thirteen others. The negators might have done less damage, but they would have killed Barrin and captured all of Urza’s devices and the time machine itself. It had been a reasonable trade. Urza had saved fifteen, and kept his work from Phyrexian claws. Yes, it had been a very good trade.

  The Tolarian survivors stood frozen and silent in that caressing wind. There was a single, broad-crowned tree at the top of the grassy hill, and it alone moved, breathing the balmy air.

  Urza cast the last enchantment he held. It was his final saving act on that afternoon, for he was spent. He would not be able to maintain his physical coherence much longer. It was a feat of will to cast that last spell, to transform Barrin back into flesh.

  Stone became bone and muscle and blood. Barrin awoke.

  Brows knotted darkly above his intense brown eyes, the man staggered through tall grass to reach Urza.

  “Where are we?”

  Urza achingly shook his head. “I do not know.”

  Nodding, Barrin took a calming breath and looked out over the rolling hills, chartreuse beneath the cloud-cluttered sky. “Why are we here?”

  A shadow passed over Urza’s features. “Tolaria is gone. The time machine exploded. We are the survivors.”

  The younger man’s mouth dropped open, and he gazed with angry appraisal at the other thirteen, arrayed like tombstones in a forgotten graveyard. “Just us? Just fourteen?”

  “Fifteen,” Urza corrected solemnly. “You and I, five scholars, and eight students.”

  Barrin crouched suddenly, clutching his knees. “And the rest?”

  Urza blinked. He did not need to blink, but it was an old habit that came with disturbing thoughts. “Most are dead. Some may live, sheltered by rubble, but most likely not.”

  His assistant remained on his haunches. He panted like a dog afraid of thunder. “We have to go back. We have to get them.”

  “Teleport, if you have such a spell ready. I can do nothing more for a time,” Urza replied grimly. “I am spent. As it is, I cannot anchor myself here much longer.”

  “I have no teleport spells. I had no thought I would need one,” Barrin spat. “Then a boat or something. We have to go save whoever may remain.”

  Already Urza’s form f
aded, his features shifting. The gemstones that had become his eyes flickered. The fire in them guttered near death. “We will find them in time, any who escape the island tonight. Any who do not will be dead by morning.”

  * * *

  Karn heaved on the slanting slab of limestone. It creaked. Its far end ground massively against the edges of the rubble field. The voices beneath cried out in hope and terror as light appeared above—not sunlight, but firelight from the raging flames of the explosion. Karn levered the edge of the stone a foot off the ground, and two young students scrambled out. The silver man hauled the block higher. An aged scholar with a bloody head clawed his way free.

  “That’s all of us,” gasped the man raggedly.

  “Head for the jungle,” Karn ordered as he let the stone grind back downward. “Go through the ruins, not the clear paths. Move through the deep jungle. Get to the sea. Stay away from the clear paths. They are time gashes, and if you enter them, they will kill you.”

  The aged scholar was still on his knees, cradling a broken arm. His two young students huddled shivering beside him. The man looked about at the devastation. Here and there ragged remains of buildings towered precariously. Between crumbling stacks of stone, the ground had been scoured to bedrock. Bodies littered the smashed edifices, but in the clear paths nothing at all remained but fire-scarred rock. The old man scratched his silver hair just beneath a bubbling gash. He blinked, and blood droplets leaped from his eyelashes to spatter his cheeks.

  “Once we reach the sea, what then?” the man rasped.

  “Find others,” Karn advised as he moved toward the next sounds of screaming. “Find something that floats. Malzra kept boats on the east shore.”

  It was all he had time to say. He’d rescued seventeen so far, though most of those would die of their wounds or wander into wild time storms that would tear their bodies apart. Karn had already encountered a few such destructive regions, and even his silver bulk, engineered to survive temporal fluxes, had been nearly destroyed. Any creature of flesh needed only to catch his head in a different time stream from his heart, and his veins would burst. Karn had seen it happen many times already today, too many times.