Barrin came next, carrying the stowed tent that would hold him and Urza, as well as clanking pots and an assortment of swaying parcels.
Behind him, Karn carried the burden of ten men. Throughout the line, other, smaller automata ambled beneath heavy packs. The rest of the company consisted of aging scholars and young students, at once eager and fearful about what lay ahead.
“Karn, come up here. I want you to see this,” Jhoira said.
She gestured toward a wide, glaring, and desolate swamp filled with the ghost-gray corpses of drowned and burned-out trees. The water in it was black and seemed infinitely deep. Insects hung in static suspension above the mirror waters. Some were poised just before death, the goggle eyes and gaping mouths of fish stretching the surface tension below.
“I call this Slate Waters. Here the fires from the original explosion went out only seven years ago, after drenching rains. Before then, a pillar of smoke rose above the spot. By my calculations, in Slate Waters the equivalent of ten days have passed since the blast. Step in there, and you’d need a time machine to get back out.”
Karn stared at the spot. It reflected darkly in his hide. “My time-traveling days are done. Master Malzra is intent on other pursuits. I’m not much needed these days.” The words sounded at once relieved and disappointed.
Jhoira studied her old friend. Provisions hulked up from his massive shoulders.
“Don’t worry, old friend. I need you.” She patted his side and pivoted. “Now look over on this side of the path. That’s a temporal plateau. I call it the Hives because of the domed mud huts that its residents build across it.” She pointed to a region that was forever in twilight, the land sunk in a vast pall.
Scattered forests of short, scrubby trees clung to the hillsides, a gray and torn fabric of woodlands that looked all the more spectral because of the blur of their wind-rattled leaves and rapidly growing boughs. Here and there, in clear patches among these stern woodland copses, rounded hovels took rapid shape, proliferating like chambers in a mud-daubers’ nest until whole dim villages could be discerned in spots, and slender footpaths marked the ground between them. The villagers themselves moved with unseeable speed. As quickly as a particular settlement would mound into being, it would dissolve away again, ephemeral as bubbles atop boiling water.
“Five of their generations are born and die during one of our years,” Jhoira said levelly to Urza, who had taken the occasion to stop and stare.
Barrin, coming up behind, asked breathlessly, “Five generations of whom? There were no natives on this island.”
Jhoira’s eyes were keenly fastened on Urza’s face. “I can only assume these were students of the academy, caught in extreme fast time, as unable to escape their rift as we are to enter it. They are fifty generations removed from your school. They have lived a thousand years of tribal history since then.”
Barrin was stunned silent for a moment. Then he said, “They see us right now, don’t they? The hour it will take us to march past their land will be four days of their time. We are statues to them.”
“Yes. Unreachable, inexplicable, nearly immobile statues,” Jhoira affirmed. “They can hear us, too, but our speech is deep and long and meaningless, like whale-song. Haunting and otherworldly. They’ve become a different race from us. Soon they’ll be a different species.” She began walking again, and the line of students and scholars stretched out behind her. “There’s an even more fearsome sight in another time plateau ahead. But first, paradise.”
All down the lines, scholars and students traded intrigued looks and hunkered down beneath their burgeoning packs. Jhoira led them up a meandering hillside, past stands of cypress and creeping vines on the left and a gray place of tumbled downs on the right. For some time, the hives of mud and stick were still visible, boiling and receding among the trees.
Eventually, the party reached a new place, a highland with rolling green embankments and thick forest growth. The native flora of Tolaria thrived here on the bright hillsides. Fat-boled trees were green from root-clusters to crowns. Vines like vein work coiled along every stem. Broad leaves lay in a series of dense canopies above.
“This is a mild slow-time area, where sunlight and rainwater are gently enhanced, where creatures and plants live in abundance, where the heat of the canopy is matched by the cool of the forest floor. The hills allow enough runoff to keep the land from becoming deluged, and the hollows where water collects are deep and clear and cool. It is paradise. I call it Angelwood, after the fireflies that light it at night. Whenever I have grown exhausted from my cliff-side vigil. I have come here to swim and climb and breathe again. That is perhaps the best part, breathing again.”
Eyes all around the group turned hungrily toward the garden of delights. Sweat-dotted brows eased.
Among the vast tree trunks, large bright birds flew dreamily through curtains of light and shadow. Beneath them, water bounded down a sloping face of stone and emptied into a clear brown channel. After coiling among the forest’s seeking roots, the waterway slid into a nearby vale, forming a deep, cool pool before spilling into another stream at the far side. Beneath the surface of the water, the silvery gleam of fish shone.
“Why didn’t you make this your home?” one student asked, pushing brown hair back from her eyes. “The game is plentiful, the nights are warm, the water is pure, and you would live longer there than anywhere else.”
Jhoira was grim. “You can’t live in paradise.”
She set out again. The company behind her lingered, a few sipping on canteens, but most just standing and staring. One student made a point of scrawling a crude map on a piece of paper, apparently intent on returning to this spot when time allowed.
Jhoira led the group up toward a wide level place where an outcrop of ancient granite had been worn down like a filed tooth. Aside from the eastern pinnacles, this summit was the highest point on the island. Its gray crown was scoured clean by the blast, dead trees lying in parallel lines all about the peak. Young trees sheltered by the fallen logs rose in the midst of the devastation, a future forest. From the top of the rock, the views were clear from the pinnacles in the east to Jhoira’s niche in the west.
There, atop that worn-down stone, the company of fifty paused to catch breath and shake out weary legs. The intimate vistas of Angelwood were replaced by the panorama of what Jhoira called the Giant’s Pate. In the east, the sea was a quicksilver curtain streaming down from the white-rising sun. New Tolaria was a dark and tiny silhouette against it, crew resting about the deck in the quiet of morning. The shore was a beige ribbon, silky and coiling. Inland, forest and briar, marsh and meadow made shifting patterns of green and gray, shade and daylight. It was a verdant land.
Not so the westward Isle. Its distant shore was a bright orange pile of rankled rocks, among which Jhoira’s niche nestled. Closer to the Giant’s Pate, the ruins of Old Tolaria lay. They were gray and blighted. The onetime logic of walls and paths was still obvious in the maze-work of foundations, but most of the buildings had been razed by the blast. Here and there part of a structure remained, sometimes in gutted, unnatural towers with open sides and decrepit backbones of stone. Though not an actual crater, the slow-time field of Old Tolaria was noticeable in the bright shimmer of the air over those ruins and the water that lagged in cellars and leaning doorways.
Nearby the glaring section that was Old Tolaria was another district, a place of deep darkness in a literal canyon. It lay in the morning shadow of the Giant’s Pate, but its gloom was intensified by the high, leaning walls of the canyon and the vast time shift within it. The floor of the space was indistinguishable, and some of the students whispered it was a crack right through to the underworld.
“It looks like a good place for ghosts,” one said.
“If I were dead, I’d choose a home like that,” another answered lightly.
“It looks like a scar in the world,” vent
ured a third with awe, “a bad scar, one that tried to close and heal but only festered and grew deeper.”
“You are more right than you imagine,” Jhoira said. “That is a very deep chasm and a sheer fast-time precipice. But there is a bottom to it, and there are creatures trapped in it.”
“Like the tribes in the Hives?”
“No,” Jhoira said flatly. “Look there. You may not be able to see it while the Giant’s Pate casts its shadows—sometimes it can’t be seen even at the height of midday, but there is a fortress down there.”
Urza’s brow furrowed in concern. “A fortress?”
“Perhaps it is only a kind of commune, but what I have seen of it looks savage and braced against attack.”
“What have you seen?” Barrin asked.
“Spiked battlements, for one, a causeway of suspension bridges between high guard towers, flying buttresses that look like they are fashioned of dragon bone, windows as: black and smooth as onyx, fiendish adornments, and thick-cast tiles of clay. I have the notion they would prefer to make everything of steel, if they could make it, but iron is the best they have and not much of it. It has taken many hours of distant observation to piece that much together. I would not suggest close scrutiny: I’ve seen harpoons fly from that space, spear deer, and drag them in.”
Barrin blinked in confusion. “This barbarous culture arose from refugees from the academy? Students of ours?”
“Again, no,” Jhoira said. “You remember that man, Kerrick, whom you found with the broken leg, whom you interrogated as a Phyrexian sleeper? The man I had let into the academy? Remember that he escaped an hour before the blast? He must have been trapped in that fast-time gash—he and whatever Phyrexian negators he had summoned to Tolaria.”
* * *
Through a two-story-tall window of polished obsidian, K’rrik watched the new arrivals. They stood atop the gleaming peak at the height of the island, a summit always visible to K’rrik and his retainers here in the depths of the abyss.
Jhoira was among them. She seemed, in fact, to be leading them. She had been a canny foe during the century of his imprisonment in this time-gash. She never entered range of the harpoon crews, and more’s the pity. He had much to repay her for. Betrayal to Urza Planeswalker was chief among the offenses. Putting a harpoon through her gut and hauling her across the jagged lip of the chasm to burst like a fist-clutched skull—that would have been glad repayment of her debts.
She probably still called him Kerrick. She probably, still thought of him as a golden-haired boy, but a hundred years had turned Kerrick to K’rrik, had made the smooth-skinned Phyrexian sleeper into a hoary warrior.
If there were some way to bring Jhoira over alive, not masticated like the goat and deer carcasses they feasted on, K’rrik would at last consummate their “love.” That was her other great offense, her persistent virtue in the face of his advances. It was galling that flimsy chastity should stand against the might of Phyrexia.
Of course, if he could drag her across whole, he himself could have escaped this abyss. It had taken the death of half his negator minions—twelve of the twenty-four—to finally convince K’rrik to suspend his escape attempts. Even so, with each new generation decanted, he sent one in ten out to seek escape—a tithe to his eventual return to Tolaria, to Dominaria.
This ten percent attrition was no great loss. He still commanded a mighty nation of two hundred Phyrexians. They filled every corner of the chasm. Generations of them worked in the deep dank of the waters at the base of the canyon. They hatched, netted, and gutted the various species of blind scavenger fish that were their major diet. Other Phyrexians, for generations, drilled deep into the chasm walls in search of buried veins of obsidian and the basalt stones the palace was built of. Scant resources had been the only real limit to K’rrik’s inventive genius. If he could make steel or powerstones, his artifact creatures would have overrun the isle eighty years ago. As it was, what little iron the miners found was more precious than gold. It was constantly oiled with Phyrexian blood to prevent rust. An iron sword like K’rrik’s was a kingmaker. It made him unopposable in the arena and maintained his power. Thus the miners who found scant veins of iron were essential to his power base, the figurative foot soldiers of his regime. By carefully distributing these slivers of iron among real foot soldiers, K’rrik controlled a private army engineered to be loyal only to him. These killers used draconian measures to ensure the compliance of all the others. K’rrik presided over the army and the nation because he had created both and was the smartest, strongest, and most vicious of them all.
To these native talents, the Phyrexian sleeper had added enhancements to himself of bone and steel and, eventually, even spawned tissue implants. He was indomitable in the arena. His once-smooth shoulders were now adorned with tusks hollowed out to inject scorpion-fish poison in anyone he fought. Similar spikes jutted from his elbows and knees. The spikes were back-barbed like arrows so that once they sunk into flesh, they ripped it out in great chunks. His torso was braced by a black-steel frame that prevented his spine from being broken and allowed him to break the spines of others. He himself had wielded the cleaver that removed his outer two fingers of each hand, making room for more venom spikes. The century of imprisonment in the abyss had done much to perfect his form.
Now, gazing through the thick, dark glass of his upper throne room, K’rrik saw the means by which he would at last escape his prison—the power of his old foe, Urza Planeswalker.
* * *
It was a bitter pill for Master Malzra, Jhoira could tell. The man stood there, gazing into that black jag in the ground. His eyes saw more than most eyes did—they gleamed with an acute, penetrating judgment. Surely they saw past the shrouding murk to the Phyrexian colony that lay within it. Surely Malzra peered into that black pile of basalt and obsidian to the wretched creature at the heart of it—malicious and brooding, growing a year in strength for every month outside.
Kerrick was the man. Even without preternatural sight, Jhoira knew that. Of course, he was no man, but a monster wearing the skin of a man. She knew he was at the nexus of that vast infection and that he would be powerful now, perhaps the equal of Malzra himself, perhaps his superior.
Karn’s eyes, too, saw more than most. He drew Malzra, Barrin, and Jhoira aside from the others.
“It is no secret to any of you what I was made for—to travel down the throat of time. Perhaps I have found my new purpose here, to enter that place and destroy them.” The suggestion was made with a mild, matter-of-fact tone, but in a voice like the myriad whisper of trees before a summer storm.
A knowing glance passed between Malzra and Barrin.
The mage said through a grim smile, “I seem to remember just such a journey, from my study of arcane lore. There was once upon a time a planeswalker who went into Phyrexia to destroy it. He was armored much as you are, Karn, but was nearly destroyed in the attempt.”
Malzra nodded. “It is a good analogy. What we have here is a pocket Phyrexia. And in Tolaria.” His all-seeing eyes were suddenly hooded beneath angry brows. “Jhoira, you spoke last night of the children of fury I have left in my wake—the orphaned mistakes that have, in my absence, grown up to defy me, to hate me, to harry me and slay me if they can. I see now just how true your words are.” He blinked and drew a deep breath, two actions that signaled a powerful shift in the mind of the man. “Better not to create such foes than to be forever fighting them.”
Barrin looked with admiration at him.
The sun glinted from Malzra’s lifted eyes as he marked its march across the sky. “Already the sun begins its descent. Come, take us to Old Tolaria, to a place where we can safely make camp. Somewhere outside the slow-time slough in the center of the blast. Preferably on high ground nearby, where time follows its normal courses.”
A solemn look crossed Jhoira’s face. “I know just the place.”
She t
urned, heading for a path down from the Giant’s Pate toward the decimated academy below. Squinting in tired amazement, the students and scholars on the hilltop watched her go. Many of them were worn out from staring into the impenetrable blackness of the Phyrexian rift and exhausted from the nettling worry that the cleft awoke in them. They had unpacked meals of press-bread and jerky. When Jhoira marched on, they glanced a question at Master Malzra and Barrin. The two men took their last survey of the spot and started after her. Flashing on the brow of the hill, Karn also set his feet to the path. With angry sighs, the students jammed their half-eaten lunches back into their packs, hauled the parcels to their shoulders, and stomped onward down the trail.
Jhoira took a path that had been carved out by her own feet during her rambles. It passed a number of other time rifts, these small and severe, some as narrow as an arm’s breadth but a mile in length. Jhoira called these the Curtains of Eternity because anyone who ventured into them would be instantly torn to pieces. There was no need to instruct the party to stay strictly to the path.
Beyond loomed the labyrinth of riven buildings that had once been the Tolarian Academy. The march line stilled to silence as they approached the necropolis. The older members of the company had lived in these gutted hulks, had had friends who died in the cross-sectioned towers and lay even now, skeletal, beneath the piles of cut stone. To the natural dread that came upon them all in descending into that dead place, there was added the drag of slow time on their hearts and lungs. To step onto those ravaged and rubble-strewn streets was to sink into a nightmare made real in stone and bone and ash. Eerily, the sun shone bright and merciless in that flagging place. Those who glanced up toward it saw the fiery ball fleeing visibly toward the horizon.
During their tour of the old town, Jhoira led the group to a particularly disturbing sight. It was the statue of a young man running. Both feet hovered impossibly above the ground. His mouth was wide in despair. His eyes were clenched tight. His hands groped out madly. His white robes were lit with a diffuse orange glow that enwrapped him and rose into an onion-shaped dome over his head. The young man was ensconced in a pillar that shone with fiery light. Just ahead of him, floating still in air, was a heavy cloak, caught in the moment before descending to enfold him.
Time Streams Page 11
