The screaming came from ahead. Karn found a guard pinned under a boulder. The man’s upper body had been burned to resemble the purple-black flesh of a date. His lower body was smashed beneath the giant stone.
“Get it off me! I can’t feel my legs. Lift it off me.”
Grim-eyed, Karn knelt by the boulder, set his shoulder against its bulk, and heaved. The moment the stone eased up from the man’s crushed pelvis and legs, a great tide of blood fled out of his belly, and he sank immediately into death.
Karn let the boulder back down. He stood. He could not imagine a worse fate for these folk—half of them only children and the other half fragile old men and women. He could not imagine how an invasion of Phyrexians could have been worse than this. It was a second Argoth, this destruction, and Malzra was a second Urza, more willing to destroy the whole world than let another creature rule it.
If only Jhoira still lived…that might make all this carnage less bitter. If only, but her shattered cell was buried beneath tons of rubble, and no pleading had come from it. Perhaps she had escaped. Perhaps she was still out there, somewhere, in the ruined, burning place.
Another shout came from just ahead, where a tower had fallen atop a corner of the north dormitory. Karn marked the swirling temporal storm that roiled in the space between him and the spot, and he strode out to circumnavigate it.
Perhaps she is still out there.
* * *
It was near to midnight when the ship slid slowly from its dock and out into the black, rolling sea. Its masts had burned away along with its sails. About three feet above waterline, its bow bore a gaping, man-sized hole where a red-hot chunk of iron had struck it. The boat was slowly taking on water, but Karn and a few of the other survivors were healthy enough to man the bilge pumps.
The rest—only thirty-three in total—huddled together on the singed deck and watched fearfully as the burning island slid silently away behind them. Fires blazed across the island, and weird lights danced in veils that reached through the clouds overhead. Waves surged in fits against the rocky shores, and a hellish moan of tortured winds made the place seem haunted by the ghosts of the fallen. The Glimmer Moon, near to sinking into the hungry waves, watched the whole display with bald accusation.
Thirty-three survivors, mused Karn grimly as he pumped. The light of the burning isle faded behind them, and only turgid cold blackness lay ahead, the sky and sea indistinguishable and menacing. Thirty-three survivors, and Jhoira nowhere among them. How could a Phyrexian invasion have been worse than this?
“It was a terrible trade,” Karn said to himself, “terrible and unforgivable.”
Monologue
Urza says he did it to save me. He says he let the time machine explode in order to save me and a handful of others…and keep his precious designs from Phyrexian claws. In another time continuum, he claims, I was slain by Phyrexian negators, and the school was overrun. Urza diverted that time stream so we could end up here, or so he says.
He is not truly mad. I know that now. He may be lying—a terrifying possibility, for what dark motive would make Urza lie to me? He may be telling the truth—all the more terrifying. But he is not truly mad.
Tolaria is gone, just like Argoth. And why? To save me? Of course not. I was saved from Tolaria just as Tawnos was saved from Argoth, as a side thought.
Tolaria is gone because if Urza could not have it, no one would. Urza is still Urza. I doubt he will ever return to the island he has destroyed, return to rebuild, to declare himself father to the scholars he has orphaned. I doubt it.
Mad or sane, he does not learn from his mistakes.
—Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria
Karn stood at the prow of a very different ship—large and golden and fully regaled—when he next saw Tolaria. The isle was only a dark shoulder above the heaving sea. Sky and water scintillated with life and daylight, but that jag of land on the horizon was as dead and dull as a dried bloodstain. Karn shuddered. He remembered that horrible night among the raging fires and toppled walls and time fissures.
The scratches he had suffered that night had all been polished away. Other improvements had been made in the ten years since the destruction of Tolaria. Master Malzra had completely replaced the finger mechanism that Jhoira had repaired. He had also redesigned the latch and coupling device that held Karn’s skullpiece in place, lest other foes learn the trick of it as easily as had Kerrick or the negator in Jhoira’s room. In his tinkering way, Malzra had worked a piecemeal overhaul of the power conduits throughout the golem’s frame, making his reflexes somewhat quicker. Outwardly Karn seemed a new creature.
Inwardly he felt very old. His intellectual and affective cortex—the dark power matrix—remained, and with it sad memories of his first friends. He thought often of Teferi, the young and brilliant mage. He thought even more often of Jhoira, Malzra’s best and brightest artificer and Karn’s only true friend. Every day that dawned after that hopeless night, Karn remembered his friend and mourned for her.
“What are you thinking?” came a kindly voice at the silver man’s shoulder. It was Barrin. He squinted against the bright sea and sky, and strands of silver glimmered in his hair. His eyes reflected the dark wedge of distant Tolaria. “You have been standing here all morning.”
Karn turned back to face the approaching isle. “I am thinking of lost friends.”
Barrin’s voice softened. “It is a difficult return for all of us. But one long overdue.”
“It is a place of ghosts,” Karn observed. He could feel Barrin’s intense eyes focused on the side of his face but did not look at him.
“You never cease to amaze me, Karn,” the mage master said incredulously, “a machine that sees ghosts all around.”
“Don’t you remember the lost students, the lost friends?” Karn asked.
Barrin took a long breath. “Oh, yes, I remember them, and I will be sad to be back where they perished. But I have mourned. It has been ten years. There are new flowers rising among your ghosts.”
“I still ache over my friends,” Karn replied. “It is as raw as on that first day.”
“Perhaps it is something to do with flesh. Mourning is healing. You cannot heal. You cannot truly mourn. You can only ache forever,” Barrin thought aloud. He sounded pensive. “We’ll have to devise some means to keep you from aching forever.”
At last Karn turned toward the man. Beyond Barrin he saw the golden ship, manned by a whole new contingent of students and scholars. Gold-painted rails glimmered in the sea-shine, and, white sails reached eagerly toward the isle. At the helm stood Malzra himself, at once ancient and young. The ship’s name even told the tale—New Tolaria—and for the last eight years, it had been laboratory and tutorial hall and dormitory to all of them, vessel for all of Malzra’s pursuits.
It was the genius of humans to discard the old and embrace the new, but flesh was malleable. Silver was not.
“How can I forget this ache and still be me?”
* * *
Jhoira stood at the edge of her world. Behind her lay Tolaria, desolated by the blast of Master Malzra’s time machine. Before her lay the illimitable sea. She was caught between. Her secret trysting spot had become her home. It was a small place, but dry and clean, appointed with furniture, books, and implements scavenged from the academy.
Most of the old school lay in ruins. The walls that remained were leaning hazards. The walls that had fallen were cairns for the dead. Many of the living had been buried in them too.
Jhoira herself had had to dig for three days to escape the secret passage where she had been when the inferno began. She spent the next three days digging up the final few others who were trapped alive. She and eight others—all young students, resilient, canny, and agile—withdrew from the death-smelling place to Jhoira’s secret niche. They, of course, made forays back into the ruins, to bury the dead and salvage equipment
and food stores. These trips were far from safe. On the first such excursion, the group lost four of its members who wandered into extreme time rifts and were torn apart. Jhoira and the remaining four learned to avoid such rankling crevasses of time.
Some zones were dark and dry, their flora withered away. These were fast-time areas, where a week might pass in a day. Such places received perhaps a day’s worth of sunlight and rainwater in a week and so became chill deserts. The darker and drier the zone, the faster the time in it and the more extreme the rent between it and the temporal flow of the rest of the island. Other zones were bright and wet—steamy swamps. These were slow-time areas, where a day took perhaps a week to pass. In such areas, the sun was intensely bright, moving visibly across the sky, and rain came in constant, short, drenching downpours. Most slow-time areas had not had time to adjust to their new climactic conditions, flooded to their edges and filled with drowned trees. In others, time moved so slowly, the fires of the original blast still stood in orange curtains.
Extraordinary time shifts proved impassable to Jhoira and her companions. Crossing such verges boiled blood and shredded skin, caused some limbs to die of deprivation and turn gangrenous and others to burst as interstitial tissues swelled. Such were the fates of the first four who died. The survivors were careful to map and avoid the violent time rifts. They ventured with trepidation into more moderate time fissures and found them difficult to enter and leave. Changes in inertia caused walking into a slow-time area to feel like wading forward into hardening cement. Emerging from slow time to fast time often resulted in extreme dizziness and sometimes loss of consciousness.
Even so, the final survivor of the school came from an extreme fast-time peak, which fused inexplicably with a slow-time slough beside it. From the normalized zone stepped an old man named Darrob. He had been only a child of twelve at the time of the blast but, five years later, he emerged a gray-haired madman.
There was only one true benefit Jhoira and her companions discovered from these time shifts—slow-water. Water resisted temporal change, retaining the speed of its former milieu awhile before gradually absorbing a new pace. Water that flowed from a certain extremely slow-time zone had preserving qualities, slowing and even stopping the aging of anyone who drank the thick stuff. Jhoira had no real idea how it worked, but she knew it did, at least for the short term. It was by drinking slow-time water that she had stayed young—seeming only twenty-two.
Despite this rejuvenating drink, death stalked the survivors of Tolaria. In the sixth year, their numbers were dwindled from six to five. Out hunting snakes, a fifteen-year old boy fell down the sea cliff, broke his neck, and was dragged out to sea, even as the others swam helplessly after him. Two years later, a pair of eighteen-year-old lovers carried out a suicide pact, leaving only Jhoira, old Darrob, and another young woman. This last withered soon after, wasted by some interior disease. Her ashes nourished the rose bushes she had so patiently planted and pruned and nurtured. In the two years since her death, the roses had gone wild, spreading across the nearby boulders in a savage, fragrant blanket.
Old Darrob was dead now, too. Three months back, he had succumbed to the rattle in his chest. Jhoira had buried him beside the slab of sandstone where Darrob had loved to lie, a great silver lizard soaking up sunlight. His years in the dim depths of fast-time had taught him to love the sun. He had been Jhoira’s last companion and, though mad himself, her final hold on reality. Since the day of his death, Jhoira had felt her own soul going wild, like the thorny rose.
She was alone now, yes, but she always had been. The nine who had lived with her had been companions, not friends, not confidantes. The only true friend she had ever had was Karn, and he was not even human. Jhoira often wondered what was wrong with her. Perhaps she had been taken from her people too young. Among Ghitu, a girl was not a woman until she had gone on a vision quest. Jhoira had never gone. She was twenty-eight chronologically and twenty-two by all appearance, but her soul was still the foolish and frightened soul of a child. That child had made one desperate lunge toward adulthood, had opened her secret heart to one man, believing love could not be fooled. It could be. It always would be. The man had proven a monster. Now, forevermore, Jhoira would be alone. It was a miserable way to live, but it was at least that—a way.
The island had become hers. At some point in the forty mad seasons since the blast, her fierce desire to escape the forsaken land had become a fierce desire to protect it from invaders. At first she referred to this new mania as Malzra’s Malaise—a fear of invaders, destroyers. Now she was beyond such light and self-conscious word-play. She was the island’s protector, its guardian spirit. She was the ghost woman on the western shore, forever watching for nearby ships, forever fashioning arrows as Kerrick had taught her, forever designing and building whatever mechanisms she could for the defense of the land.
And now, with unmistakable intent, a white-bellied sailing ship sliced through the spitting billows, making straight for the eastern ports of the island. Jhoira had not forgotten her dream of glimpsing her soul mate on a ship such as that one, but such were the fantasies of a child. Love could and would and forever must be fooled.
Jhoira watched the ship a moment more before withdrawing into the niche, fetching up her bow and quiver of arrows and heading out to intercept the landing party. With the whole of the island between her and the docks, and over a hundred time rifts slicing through the center, Jhoira would not beat them to the shore. It didn’t matter. The island’s natural defenses were formidable enough.
* * *
Barrin inhaled the salty scent of the eastern bay, remembering the smell of saw grass and palm. He sensed nothing of death or decay in the air and was glad. Perhaps time did heal all wounds. Perhaps Tolaria had forgiven—or at least forgotten—its despoiler.
Barrin glanced back toward Urza, who helmed the golden galley New Tolaria. It had become his floating workshop, mobile and elusive, beyond the reach of any petty government. From the moment the refitted and renamed ship had slid out of dry dock, Urza had been its unquestioned master. Captain Malzra, the students called him, and he proved a deft helmsman. Somewhere in his three and a half millennia, the man had learned to sail. Better still, Urza’s knack for teaching seamanship equaled his talent for teaching artifice. He did not so much instruct as demonstrate and inspire. The young scholars needed only watch the master hoist the main or scale the ratlines before they all wanted to do it as well and as quickly as he.
Of course, being a functional immortal with a body of pure energy can make even the oldest planeswalker a marvel in feats of strength, agility, and speed.
As New Tolaria rounded the stone jetty at the mouth of the bay, Urza manned the helm, and his young crew worked their posts with a quiet ease that allowed them long looks at the land ahead. Barrin, too, studied his erstwhile home.
The eastern docks remained largely intact, though the pilings were desiccated from neglect, and thorny weeds had volunteered in the rotting planks. Two ships of the former Tolarian complement lay half submerged dockside, their upper portions scored with burn marks; and their lower portions so covered in barnacles they seemed made of stone instead of waterlogged wood. As each wave rolled, long and even, across them, they rocked indolently in the basins they had hollowed for themselves.
On the opposite edge of the bay, a sinister slough of dark water lay, its surface churning as though it boiled. A time rift, Barrin realized. Urza had described such phenomena after returning from one of his planeswalking scouting excursions. He had spoken in depth about the physics of the rents but could answer none of the important questions, such as—what happens to mortal flesh that ventures into or out of one? Urza’s only response to such queries was, “We’ll have to find out when mortal flesh encounters one.” Barrin had made sure the students were taught how to recognize temporal anomalies and warned what dangers might surround them. He had even devised illusory models and magical simula
tions to prepare the explorers, but all he could offer was supposition. The experiments with mortal flesh were yet to come.
Urza steered clear of the time rift and the other hazards in the bay and brought New Tolaria smoothly into the deep-water inlet. He shouted orders, and one by one the last few sails were taken in. Released by the wind, the ship lounged aft and piled up glassy mounds of water before it. It slowed to a near stop, Urza leaned on the rudder, and students eagerly crowded the starboard rail, each wanting to be the first to leap to the dock and tie off the ship. Two young women were the first with the strength and daring to jump, and three young men followed shortly after. Their laughing comrades hurled to them thick coils of line, which they swiftly hitched onto the pilings. The great vessel lulled once to the fore with the last of its lazy motion and then settled in on its moorings.
More students leaped to the dock and received the gangplank hoisted down to them. It no sooner boomed into place than the five ensigns and their five exploratory parties were trooping in orderly fashion onto the dock. The ensigns were the oldest students—in their mid-twenties—left from the school at Tolaria, and their parties were picked from late-teens who had volunteered knowing the dangers they would face. These groups debarked with the easy strides of conquerors. The white robes of the former academy had been replaced by rugged canvas cloaks and capes, with leather leggings, knee-high putties, and iron-edged shoes. In moments, the explorers filed off the dock and gathered in clusters, receiving orders. Then, to north, south, west, and the angles in between, they set out.
Time Streams Page 9
