Time Streams

by J. Robert King

The largest Viashino in the party of thirty-some approached Urza. It held its hook-edged polearm out before it. The creature glared into the planeswalker’s eyes. Slivered pupils stared, unblinking. There was intelligence in that alien gaze, but also fear and resentment. It hissed angrily.

  Urza’s mind scrolled through all the languages he had learned in three millennia, many of them only written, never spoken. This tongue was not among the ones he had heard before, but for Urza to know a language was only for him to breathe it in.

  “Ghitu are forbidden this high,” the lead creature hissed.

  To understand an alien language was one thing; to frame a response in it was something else. Urza wondered if he should have brought Jhoira with him as a native liaison. He could planeswalk and snatch her up even now, but the rattle of polearm butts on volcanic scree convinced him not to endanger her. He kept his constructions simple.

  “Do I look Ghitu?”

  “Who are you, then?”

  “I am Malzra of Tolaria. I have come to see the rig.”

  “It is forbidden.”

  “I must see the rig. You cannot stop me.”

  “Perhaps I cannot,” the warrior said, his eyes glinting like metal, “but our champion can.”

  From the rear ranks of the Viashino, eight lizard men emerged—not eight, but one the size of eight. It was not a Viashino, though, but a young Shivan drake. The massive creature slithered forward on hands and feet, tail lashing viciously behind it. A predatory grin drew black jowls back from rows of daggerlike teeth. The thing’s eyes were small and keen beneath homed brows. Scaly spikes rose across its shoulders. In place of the robes of the others, this brute wore a leather harness, as though it were often used to haul heavy machinery.

  No dumb beast, though, the drake reared up and snorted, “I am Rhammidarigaaz, champion of the Viashino. Feeling so arrogant now?”

  Urza tilted his head in admission. Were he a mere man, he would be terrified at the prospects of battle, but Urza could sidestep the fastest blows of this creature, could shock the drake mercilessly until it fell dead, could enervate it so it could not attack, could summon armies of artifact creatures to swarm the hillside and dismantle these creatures. Subtlety in dealing with such creatures was a lesson hard learned over the last few thousand years. It was not fear that informed his next actions, but a concern that he not reveal too much about his powers—just yet.

  “Arrogant? No. Confident? Yes.” Urza waved the monster forward.

  Rhammidarigaaz came on. The shouldering might of the drake was like a mountain moving. Urza did not flinch away. Without changing appearance, his robes hardened into armor that would bend only when he willed it to. The creature clutched him in one massive claw, nails clamping down. Urza did not struggle. Rhammidarigaaz hoisted him into the air and snorted hot breath over him.

  It regarded the unmoving man. “Shall I bear you to the dungeons or kill you now?”

  “You will let me go,” Urza replied placidly, “and take me to your king.”

  “Our bey does not entertain vagrants,” Rhammidarigaaz sneered, “and I cannot let you go. You have seen our homeland. You will remain our captive or die.”

  “I foresee a different future.”

  The beast clenched its claw. Urza’s robes crumpled in slowly around him, but he gave no gasp of pain. The Viashino watched in awe, half-expecting blood to rim the man’s eyes and lips.

  Instead, Urza repeated his request. “Release me, and take me to your bey.”

  Enraged, Rhammidarigaaz opened his jaws in a roar and lifted Urza into the gap. Teeth dripped hot saliva across his head. The monster shoved him inward.

  As placid as ever, Urza reached up into the drooling jowls of the thing. One hand clutched a great, slimy tooth above him, and the other a tooth below. He flexed his shoulders.

  The drake’s jaw distended. Like a dog with a stick rammed in its mouth, Rhammidarigaaz gagged and rolled his head. He hissed a cloud of acidic breath. Lizard-men scattered, but the man in the maw did not relent. Rhammidarigaaz tried to clamp his jaws together. A great clacking sound answered. He howled with pain. Yanking Urza from his mouth, he hurled the man to the ground. The beast clutched one jowl with a twitching claw.

  Urza rolled across the volcanic dirt and rose to his feet. He clutched in his hand a dripping drake tooth.

  “Now you will take me to your bey.” Urza’s gaze brooked no discussion.

  Rhammidarigaaz dropped the claw from its mouth. Scaly hackles bristled across arched shoulders. Hot plumes of death jetted from its nostrils. Twin flames swept over Urza.

  He stood in their midst. Poison and pulverized rock sluiced past him. In moments, he was lost in the dense blaze. The Viashino who had fled once did so again, backing farther from the battle. Rhammidarigaaz vented his fury until lungs were flat and throat was raw. In the aftermath of rolling smoke, there was no sign of the invader.

  Lizard men ventured timidly from the rills where they had sheltered. A purring growl that must have been laughter circulated among the creatures.

  As if stepping around a corner in space, Urza suddenly appeared. The gory dragon tooth still hung in his grasp.

  “Enough bravado. Now take me to the bey.”

  Rage blossomed blood-red in the drake’s eyes. His claws sank deep into the volcanic earth. His haunches gathered to spring. Jaw dropping wide, Rhammidarigaaz lunged through air to swallow Urza whole.

  The planeswalker grimaced. With an offhand gesture, he flung an arc of magic across the beast.

  He transformed into stone. Rhammidarigaaz, the champion of the Viashino, became a statue frozen in terrific motion. He seemed even more massive and fearsome in that aspect. His jaws gaped wide. His eyes glared blindly. His whole figure was caught in the act of a leap he would never finish.

  Urza shrugged. The pulpy tooth waggled in his hand. “Well, now instead of a champion, you have a gargoyle.” His voice grew steely. “Take me to the bey.”

  Though none of the Viashino warriors approached, the largest called out from the lee of a nearby boulder. “No. If this is what you do to our champion, what will you do to our bey?”

  It seemed a reasonable observation, and thus, by extension, these could be reasonable lizard men.

  Urza approached the drake statue. He took a few visual measurements. Positioning himself carefully out of the line of charge, Urza set the drake’s tooth back into the spot it had occupied. It no sooner touched the creature than it fused to his mouth. Urza took a step back. Next moment, the dragon’s stony semblance fell away.

  Rhammidarigaaz vaulted in his attack. The drake soared past Urza and crashed to the ground before a pile of cooled magma. Its toppling bulk shattered the stone bulwark. Chunks of rock bounded out. Viashino scattered farther. The drake’s tail lashed the ground. It rolled twice and fetched up against a rocky knob. There it lay, miserable, a twisted mess of wing and claw and scale.

  Urza gazed bemusedly at the creature. He addressed all the lizard men. “I could go to the bey without you to guide me, but there may be more mayhem.”

  The drake rose. He probed his jawline and gasped out wonderingly. “My tooth. It’s back!”

  “I can kill, or I can heal,” Urza said plainly. “You decide.”

  Viashino and drake exchanged sullen glances. The leader of the lizard men nodded meaningfully to their champion.

  “I r-regret my actions,” Rhammidarigaaz stammered resentfully. “Violence is not the way.”

  “All is forgiven. This is a lesson I took years to learn as well.” Urza said. He gestured up the trail toward the mana rig. “Shall we proceed?”

  With a wounded bow, not quite courtly but not quite mocking, the drake led Urza up the path. Viashino warriors fell in line behind them.

  * * *

  Jhoira stood in the east forest guard post along the path from the academy to the harbor. I
t was a small, remote tower, provisioned for three guards with a single cot to allow a sleeping shift. Tonight the battlements and the short length of wall were manned by only two, but Karn did not need to sleep. He stood below, beside the locked iron gate, and watched through an arrow loop in a curved section of wall. Nothing would get past him. Nothing ever did.

  One end of the wall verged on a deep fast-time rift where a contingent of eighty runners and scorpions were stationed. Anything living would be slain by the temporal curtain, and anything unliving would be swarmed by the academy’s machines. The Glimmer Moon shimmered from their silvery shoulders and watchful optics. On the other end of the wall was a steep cliff at the edge of Angelwood. The puma patrols would slay any monsters moving through the forest and the falcons any moving through the air beyond.

  It had been ten years since Jhoira had lounged away the day in one of the warm pools of Angelwood. She looked no older outwardly, but inwardly she felt ancient. The slow-time water that sustained her and all the older scholars and students preserved her body, but her spirit was no longer that of a child. She had been on her vision quest. She had learned how to “break through”—not merely to save Teferi from his isolation, but to save herself as well. She had found not a soul mate but a spiritual twin and had found that she had discovered her destiny. It was not a life of bright seas and distant shores, though. It was a life of Phyrexians, forever bubbling out of K’rrik’s dark kingdom.

  Tonight would be no exception.

  “All clear down there, Karn?” Jhoira asked, pacing the top of the rampart.

  “All clear, Jhoira,” came the response in a voice like distant thunder.

  “We have a full complement of runners tonight?”

  “Yes,” he replied quietly.

  Jhoira sighed. Karn was not much of a conversationalist while he was on watch. Her education complete, the academy built, and her post among the scholars secure, Jhoira had had her fill of lectures and demonstrations, experiments and designs. She could have used a little conversation.

  “How many negators do you think we will see tonight?”

  “The average number at this location is one for every watch of the day and three for every watch of the night,” Karn noted.

  “That number might change now that Malzra is gone—gone to Shiv,” Jhoira said sadly. “I don’t know if would even recognize the place. I was eleven when I left it. That was over forty years ago.”

  She shook her head, picking up a chip of stone from the top of the battlements and hurling it off into the forest. The stone ricocheted off a pair of trees, sending a deep and mournful echo through Angelwood.

  “I’ll probably never see the place again.”

  “Malzra said that he’d be back to collect you, once he had prepared the way,” Karn noted.

  “By the time he’s done that, I certainly won’t recognize the place,” muttered Jhoira bitterly. “The Viashino and goblins will be massacred, the drakes will be enslaved, and the mountains will be leveled into fields of glass.”

  Over the years, Karn had developed a nascent sense of humor that relied heavily on irony: “You have great faith in Master Malzra.”

  “Master Malzra? Do you know who Master Malzra is? He’s Urza Planeswalker! He’s caused every great disaster in the last three thousand years.”

  “Yes, I know,” Karn said quietly. “I overheard Barrin and Urza on numerous occasions when they thought I was deactivated.”

  Jhoira growled, tossing her hands into the air and staring daggers at the silvery figure below. “You might have mentioned it.”

  “Urza seemed to want it kept secret.”

  “Didn’t it shock you? Didn’t it seem impossible for the man to be a three-thousand-year-old legend?”

  Karn’s silvery head shook slowly. “I am a man made of silver. My best friend is a Ghitu genius who is fifty years old but looks twenty. I dwell on an island where a day might pass in minutes or years. No, Malzra’s real identity didn’t shock me,”

  “Aren’t you outraged? Here’s a man solely responsible for every wicked thing that has happened to our world. He makes messes and leaves—”

  “He has given Barrin a beacon,” Karn said.

  Jhoira’s rant was caught for a moment short. “He what?”

  “Barrin has a beacon, a jewel-handled dagger that is magically linked to a pendant around Urza’s neck. Barrin can summon him at a moment’s notice should the war turn suddenly. He can appear as quickly as the island’s native defenders.”

  Jhoira shook her head. “You’re defending him. Don’t you see? Urza should have stayed here until the Phyrexians were no longer a threat. He’s the reason the Phyrexians are here at all—”

  “We are the reason the Phyrexians are here,” corrected Karn. “You and I are the reason K’rrik is here. Urza might have been the reason they came, but we are the reason K’rrik got in. It’s up to all of us to get rid of them.”

  Even as these words sank in, Jhoira glimpsed, in the deep distance, the movement of something vast and multilegged, scuttling like a giant flea. Karn struck the alarm.

  A contingent of five runners darted emulike from the fast-time rent beside the wall. They loped forward along the trail. Their legs ratcheted in the darkness.

  The distant monster wheeled about, retreating.

  In moments the runners closed in. They flashed silver in the light of the Glimmer Moon. The small snap of quarrel rounds rattled though the forest night.

  The Phyrexian shrieked but turned. It was small and fiendish between the solemn trees.

  The scything sound of the runners’ scimitars ended in five pairs of meaty thuds. One by one, their internal charges went off. Hunks of meat and blood and mechanism leaped up into the air. In moments, there was only smoke and the tangle of legs, monster and machine.

  “We brought K’rrik here, Jhoira,” Karn repeated in the drifting silence.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “and we need to get rid of him.”

  * * *

  “Yes, Majesty,” Urza said graciously as he bowed before the lizard lord, “I am a planeswalker. I, and all Dominaria, need your forge.”

  Urza made a broad gesture, taking in the high hall, its rings of balconies, and its conic vault. He had seen much of the ancient facility on his way in—the coke chambers and blast furnaces, the mold rooms and rollers, the ancient gearwork and chain drives. He had seen enough to know that the forge was capable of producing far more than trinkets—if it was given over into the right hands.

  The bey was an elder Viashino. A gray-grizzled wattle hung at his neck, and a bright red crest topped his head. Robed in purple, Bey Fire Eye stood at an ornate rail, the equivalent of a throne for a species with neither the physiology nor the need to sit. The rail was carved from one wall of a giant piston chamber. The circular space had become a pulpit, protected from attack on three sides. Its symbolism was clear—whoever stood within the ancient piston chamber embodied the power of the arcane machinery all around. Fire Eye exuded that power. His eyes were small and implacable as they moved across the gathered throng in his audience chamber. He glowered especially at the young drake who had been sent out to best Urza.

  At last, Fire Eye spoke, “What would you build with this forge?”

  Urza blinked, taken aback a moment. “Machines. Living machines, like this one.” He reached out into empty space, and in his hand appeared a large sheet of paper—the plan of the silver man, Karn—and spread it on the floor before the bey. “Men like this. I will make them from your metal. I will make them to defend our world.”

  The bey stared for some time at the plans before hissing out his response. “This machine will work?”

  “I will show you, yes,” Urza said emphatically. “I will bring a prototype made of metal. An old model—too soft. You will see. He works well.”

  Again, the silence. Urza was not accust
omed to waiting for the decisions of others, but he needed these creatures. They knew more about the rig than any other beings on the planet. They knew the secrets of making Thran metal.

  At last, the bey spoke again, “You may make your metal men with our forge—on two conditions.”

  “Yes?” prompted Urza.

  “First, there is a certain ancient enemy of ours—”

  “The goblins?” Urza guessed.

  “No. The goblins are a menace, yes, but our patrols are more than able to dispatch them. The enemy I speak of is the fire drake Gherridarigaaz, mother of our champion. She has plagued us since her son joined us,” the bey said. “You must halt her attacks.”

  “It will be done,” Urza replied, “and the other condition?’

  “Second, grant us as our property into perpetuity the prototype creature you speak of.”

  Urza stared a long while at the lizard lord, sitting there enthroned on the massive piston. His gemstone eyes lifted, searching the darksome balconies above, as though an answer would lie there. “It is quite a sacrifice you ask.”

  The bey nodded placidly. “Among our people, sacrifice for the tribe is the highest honor.”

  There was wisdom in this saying. Urza thought of all the sacrifices in this war so far. As always, the Phyrexian threat came screaming back to the fore of his mind.

  “Yes,” said Urza Planeswalker, “you may have him.”

  Monologue

  With Urza gone, things are quiet here at the academy. We have had the usual Phyrexian incursions on the borders. They are only tests, of course, and by killing off each of these beasts, we are only helping K’rrik perfect his invasion force for the day when they will all come across. But, for now, we are safe, and we build more machines.

  I can only wonder what Urza is doing on the other side of the world. I can only hope that the lessons he has learned here at Tolaria have made him more human again. Human or inhuman, I pray he succeeds. Otherwise, we are all doomed.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria