Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Sixty pairs of wings flashed out. Sixty artifact creatures crouched a moment, gathering themselves to leap into the air. Then the wind was filled with the sharp slap of metal wings. The falcons rose in a great glittering cloud, camouflaged against the silvery work of the sea. The great rush of them upward, of wings and cogs and seeking probes, was something horrific.

  Jhoira glimpsed another mass of glimmering wings along the shore in either direction. In moments, though, even her own three squads had ceased to be individual birds and become only a writhing swarm, an amorphous swirling monster, and then it too was gone, through the ceiling of clouds. All across the island, there was no more sign of the flocks of killer raptors.

  “Gods speed you,” Jhoira said to the cluttered sky. “Gods speed you.”

  * * *

  Urza reached the peak of his spiral into the sky. He folded the wings of his ornithopter back beside the struts. The nose of the craft lost lift and dropped toward the black rift below. Urza blinked placidly behind the obsidian crescent that shaded his gemstone eyes. Wind shrieked over the triangular wings. The isle rushed up to meet him. Easing the airfoils outward, he caught lift and corkscrewed low above the black cleft. The craft leveled into a furious strafing pass.

  Black ballistae bolts soared out in a spiky forest all around him.

  Urza triggered the hold, pouring powder bombs down onto the muchscarred fortification below. Each tumbling incendiary device plunged into the fast-time envelop and rushed fiercely to impact. Shrapnel and smoke belched out in a line below Urza. He banked, soaring away from another barrage, and stared with delight at the boiling cloud of destruction. They would not see the doom that rose at the edges of the island, rose to descend and pierce the walls of their time prison and slay them.

  Nor did he see the bolt that rose with fiendish speed and smashed through his port wing and dragged him down into the Phyrexian pit.

  * * *

  Amid rolling clouds of smoke, shrieks of glee arose. Every throat and air sac and proboscis in the Phyrexian Tent hooted as the ballistae bolt transfixed Urza Planeswalker’s flying machine. It dragged on the wing. The ornithopter listed with agonizing slowness. Would the man have time and sense to planeswalk from the falling wreck? The smoke thickened, obscuring the view of all beasts below.

  K’rrik surged to the tail of his observation tower and grasped it. Even as he gripped the metal, he saw one wing of the machine dip into the fast-time envelop and send rings of distortion ripping out from it. The sudden inertial change hurled the rest of the ornithopter, rider and all, into the gorge. That was all he saw, smoke boiling up to obscure anything else.

  K’rrik spun to shout down into the riot of dying Phyrexians and burning buildings, “To the south wall! Capture the planeswalker!”

  * * *

  Stunned, Barrin and Karn saw the ballistae bolt lunge up from the black gorge like a darting fish, lance the wing of Urza’s ornithopter, and drag the listing thing down into the lashing currents of fast time. The flying machine whirled once, hung up on the surface of the envelop, and then, before Barrin could send out a saving spell, slid down into the vast murk of the gorge. Smoke and darkness obscured all else.

  Barrin turned, darting down the slope of the Giant’s Pate.

  Karn called after him, “Where are you going?”

  “You said my ornithopter was prepped,” came the shouted response, flung over Barrin’s shoulder as he ran.

  “What should I do?” Karn asked.

  “Do anything you can, but be quick. Minutes are hours.”

  The silver man suddenly wished he had the controls that would summon the runners, pumas, and scorpions.

  That useless thought was swept away by a sudden shrieking roar, descending from everywhere and nowhere at once. Karn had hardly lifted his brow when, from every corner of the heavens, shooting stars fell in a great converging ring. The whistle of their flight rattled the silver plates across Karn’s body. With a series of booms that came so close to each other as to sound like a ceaseless peal of thunder, the lightning-swift creatures lanced down the sky. They punched through the time ceiling and accelerated to blinding speed. They seemed to ricochet between the rock walls of the gorge.

  Do anything you can. The words rang in the resounding air.

  Karn shifted his silver bulk. He lifted the Viashino luck charm to his mouth for an awkward kiss, and bolted down the steep slope of fallen trees between the Giant’s Pate and the gorge. In clumsy moments, he reached the black lip of the space. Without pause or thought, he hurled himself within.

  * * *

  It happened too quickly, the impossible ballistae bolt through the wing, the sudden unresponsive stick, the listing turn, the tug of fast time, yanking Urza and his machine down into the envelope. Before he could think to planeswalk, he was immersed in the vast, churning field of the gorge. Then all of thought and will and power were channeled into holding himself together against rending, dispersing distortion.

  His hands turned to protoplasmic mush. His feet evaporated. The wave of destruction clambered up his limbs, to knees and elbows, hips and shoulders, until heart and head both were melting into air. The temporal field tore not merely particle from particle, but wave from wave. The core of his being dissolved. Urza had to think his body and mind and soul, had to plan them and stare at the immutable design of them to force chaos back into order. Again and again, he resolved himself, red clouds of pulverized meat accreting into the figure lashed in the ornithopter’s sear. All the while, the ruined bird-machine and the ruined man wrangled in a tangle between worlds of light and darkness.

  Suddenly he was free and falling. The last angry torrents of flesh recombined, and he plummeted. The air was dark and dank and foul. The scent of glistening oil was overwhelming. Sulfur smoke roiled from the bombs he himself had just dropped, and beneath those ropy columns, armies of monsters converged. They slithered in gray-skinned masses, slime and bone and horn, clambering over each other like swarming roaches.

  Urza fell.

  There was not enough strength left to planeswalk. Even if there were, his powers would not allow him to step through the gates of time. There were spells, though.

  With a weary thought, Urza cast a flying enchantment on himself and stopped his descent. Ragged, panting if only as a reminder of the physical form he cast, Urza hung for a moment in midair. With another effort of will, he began to rise toward the surface of the gorge. It was like ascending through great pressurized depths toward the air and light above.

  The first ballista bolt was a surprise, ripping through his liver and tearing out his right lung before pulverizing his sternum and snagging in his rib cage. Pain was a sensation like any other, useful for orienting him in his physical form, but this screaming, hopeless pain shattered his concentration for a moment. He shut off the claxon of agony, reshaped his body with a thought, letting flesh shrink away from the shaft until the bolt tumbled free. He grew a new liver and lung from the pulverized muck of the old ones.

  But this was work, and it distracted him a few moments. He fell again. The air rushing up around him was a flashing mass of smoke, oil-reek, and black shafts. Two more bolts pinioned him in his plummet. By the time they, too, were out and the organs they had skewered were regrown, Urza Planeswalker came splashing down in five feet of foul water.

  From a nearby causeway of carved basalt, hordes of gibbering monsters—star-shaped eyes and great shags of barbed hair and curved claws and teeth indistinguishable from each other in their scythelike savagery—hurled themselves into the water. The horrid splashing of their deformed figures seemed the slap of shark tails in frenzy. In moments, Phyrexians surrounded Urza and rushed in, biting great chunks from him.

  He thrashed against them. Lightning roared out from his hands beneath the water. Phyrexians died in scores, but more came. Whenever he fought free of them and began to rise through the air, arrows and ballista
bolts ran him through, and he sank again into the churning flood.

  They would not kill him, though they could. They would only harry him until every sorcery was spent, every last trick gone to the graveyard, then they would net him like one of their scavenger fish and haul him up to be flayed alive by the man standing there on that smoke-wreathed bridge.

  K’rrik.

  * * *

  K’rrik’s vast host gathered in the arena at the center of the city. It was an elevated circle of black basalt, carved out like a giant funnel, rings of balconies and seats converging on the small, central platform. Though used most often for gladiatorial contests—many of which featured K’rrik himself—the central space was not bounded by any rails, walls, or gates that might contain the warriors. Battles began on this stage but ranged the whole arena. Competitors were not only expected but encouraged to use the topography, weaponry, and even citizenry of the arena in their fight. The outer rim of the stadium was lined with a variety of barbed and spiked weapons provided by the state—bone, stone, and horn, but of course no iron. To get a metal weapon, a gladiator would have to wrest it from the claws of a spectator. Often obnoxious crowd members lost arms or tails, taken up as makeshift cudgels and whips, and sometimes smaller beasts were used whole.

  It was not a gladiatorial battle scheduled today, though. This crowd had assembled for a state execution. They still brought their weapons in hopes that they might get a chance to join in the fun.

  In the center of the arena, Urza Planeswalker hung, lashed to a muchscarred column of obsidian. The pillar was traditionally used to execute traitors, who were mauled to death by gibbering horrors. With Urza, the mauling hordes were needed to keep him weak and defenseless while K’rrik flaunted his new prize. The largest of his three executioners was little more than a massive fist of flesh, with two tiny eyes positioned under a pair of jagged pincers. At intervals, the beast lunged in and eviscerated Urza, dragging his steaming entrails onto the polished basalt. The other two beasts were jackal-headed spiders, waiting to leap in should Urza overpower the other killer.

  K’rrik paced before the knot of them, hissing with laughter. Though given to excited ovations whenever the planeswalker was assaulted, the gathered throng of beasts was otherwise silent, straining to hear every word of their ruler, their god. He spoke to them not in the dulcet tones he had used to ply Jhoira all those years ago. He spoke to them in no human language at all, but rather in the growling, crackling tongue of Phyrexia.

  Urza, who could drink down languages like water, knew what he said.

  “Children of Phyrexia, scions of the greater god Yawgmoth and his son K’rrik, newts and negators and spawn of time, behold the man who brought us here. Behold the man who opened for us the gateway to this new paradise, to Dominaria—”

  This statement was punctuated by a brutal lunge from the pincered beast. Rent viscera spilled in a fetid flow on the floor. A throaty howl erupted from the gathered throng. Even as the monster withdrew and K’rrik began again to speak, Urza’s innards writhed on the floor. They drew themselves by force of will back into the murdered man.

  “He has a long, honorable history of aiding our coming domination. In the caves of Koilos, he and his brother Mishra sundered the powerstone that had locked us away from Dominaria, thus opening the way for us. During Urza’s subsequent war against his brother Mishra, followers of our patriarch Gix were welcomed into both armies, and Gix even made a Phyrexian out of Mishra. When Urza learned of his brother’s conversion, he was so delighted, he loosed a catastrophe across Dominaria to slay its greatest armies, sink its mightiest nations, and soften the way for us to invade. He forsook his world, his trusted associate Tawnos, and even his own son, Harbin, all of which we have inherited.”

  “Harbin!” Urza cried out in despair, just before his gut was ripped open again and there was no breath left to scream.

  “Allying himself with our comrade—the newt Xantcha—Urza traveled to Phyrexia under the pretense of war. In truth, he was drawn to us like a gnat to a great lantern. He desired to join us, to become one of us. To show his good faith, he led an army of us to the Realm of Serra, where we initiated a war of conquest that brings the angel realm to its knees even now. He betrayed the woman who healed him and gave us her plane as a trophy,”

  The hisses and groans of delight almost drowned out the sound of spilling blood.

  “Now, our eternal champion, our spy in Dominaria and through, out all the planes has come to us. He has come to pay homage to Yawgmoth and the Son of Yawgmoth—K’rrik. He has come to grant us the world! He has given us his brother, his associate, his son, his best friend, and now, he gives us himself. Once he is dead, no one on Dominaria can stand against us.”

  Into the roaring ovation came a high-pitched whistle. The keen was omnidirectional and ear-splitting. Those Phyrexians with ears clutched them in sudden reflex. Those with knees crumpled to them. Even the massive pincer beast fell back, its fistlike head clenching and flexing beneath the onslaught. Only two creatures remained upright—K’rrik and his captive. Together they saw a vast silver corona slice through the time envelope and shriek toward the rim of the arena.

  For one flashing moment, the machines were etched vividly in the sky—a circle of razor beaks and raptor talons and wings that glared like lightning. They crossed paths in a vast spiral and, in precise succession, punched one after another into the beasts at the base of the arena.

  One monster’s inch-thick skull shattered like glass as a falcon smashed into it. Another was split open from neck to navel and spilled gray-blue organs out over its shag-furred lap. Beside that creature, a crane-necked monster was undone when a falcon bit through its neck in a shrieking pass. The creature’s eyes darkened, and its head tilted and dropped away like the crown of a felled tree.

  Whenever a falcon tore cleanly through a beast, it would continue on to attack the next one, killing two or three in progression. Whenever a falcon was caught in a particularly resistant ball of muscle or cage of ribs, its wings stabbed outward. Spinning saw blades emerged from its frame to mince whatever meat lay about. Phyrexians penetrated by falcons jittered in death spasms, their punctured bowels or chests or brainpans boiling with vicious motion.

  In an instant, the three hundred beasts in the lower seats were slain. They crumpled and jittered and spilled downward in a wave of death that crept visibly up the arena. Falcons darted like electrical jags from beast to beast, dropping them wherever they stood. More metallic birds roared in and impacted.

  In the second instant, the remaining seven hundred Phyrexians took up their own defense. They swung blades and clubs to bash the birds from the skies. The tide of slaughter slowed but did not stop. The shriek of silvery wings was joined by a manifold roar of fighting and dying Phyrexians.

  In the midst of it, tied to the obsidian post, Urza at last recovered fully from the pincer beast’s attacks. His abdomen reassembled. His flesh knitted in glowing health. He lifted his head. The jackal-headed spiders cowered back from the quicksilver cyclone that ravaged the stands all around. With a summoning of will, Urza reached out to the mountains of Tolaria and drew from them the power for four spells. A red flare arced out from Urza, burning away his ropes and impacting the pincer beast. He amplified the kindled blast with his own mounting fury. The massive monster went to shreds of meat before him, blood extinguishing the fires there.

  The jackal-spiders pivoted in sudden amazement.

  Urza flung out two other spells, fireballs splashing across them and sizzling them away. His own figure steaming with the rage of the moment, Urza stalked past the smoldering heaps of his attackers, seeking the Phyrexian at the heart of all this.

  But K’rrik was already gone.

  * * *

  Karn plummeted.

  He passed the ravening time envelope. It tore futilely at his wires and conduits. Heat sparked across his frame. His orientation meters went hayw
ire, and he could not distinguish up from down, past from future. Then, in a sick rush, he was through and plunging into the fast-time gorge.

  That was the worst feeling of all. Something in Karn responded to that place, something at the core of his being. Though he sensed the reek of oil-blood and decay in the air, though he saw the wicked outline of the monstrous city below and knew Urza was there somewhere, trapped or dead—still there was a harsh rightness to it all. It was a vast, desolate beauty that he could not help being drawn to. At first, he could not imagine from where rogue feeling arose, but then he knew. It was the core of his being. The powerstone that provided him mind and heart and soul, it had come from these monstrous creatures. Karn had come from here.

  Karn landed in a brackish lake. Filthy water coursed into every seam and hollow of his body. He struck the muck bottom—bones and decay over bedrock. Heaving himself upward, Karn stood and discovered his head cleared the surface. The rock wall of the gorge towered before him. He turned, for the first time clearly seeing the demon city Kerrick had built.

  From a volcanic outcrop at the base of the canyon rose a bristling collection of towers, walls, spikes, and battlements. The gorge walls all around the city stared out at it with deep, black mines, like mourning faces, twisted and dribbling. The waters where Karn waded teemed with ravenous creatures, many of which even now converged and nipped at his silver frame. Above the city, clouds of mechanical falcons circled in a great storm.

  Urza would be at the center of that storm.

  Ignoring the snapping jaws and battering tails, Karn trudged toward the city.