That thought, too, was squeezed out of being in the furious fist of wood around the man. If only he could think. If only he could hold a thought in his head—thought of his own…but then there was only pain.
* * *
Barrin watched from the gorge tower. It was the highest spot in the academy. Poised beyond reach of Phyrexian weapons, it curved out over the wall to peer into the dark swath. This spot was manned day and night, and of late, mainly by Barrin. From here he could gauge the movement of K’rrik’s forces to any of the four bridges from the time pit. From here, Barrin stemmed the fiendish tide with long-range sorceries and enchantments. Intelligence gathered here allowed him to deploy his machine and human forces to intercept the attackers. And here, perhaps most importantly of all, lay the triggering mechanism for the beacon pendant Urza wore.
Barrin had just activated the beacon.
It had been nearly three years since Urza had gone to Yavimaya, and no one had heard from him. He could be dead, Barrin knew. Though planeswalkers were extremely long-lived, they could be killed, especially if their life-force became unfocused or dissipated. Still, it was a very difficult thing to kill a planeswalker, but not so to trap one. A planeswalker could be trapped in deception. If Urza did not think he needed to escape, he couldn’t. If he forgot he could planeswalk, he could be trapped indefinitely. With Urza’s fragile sanity and top-heavy psyche, such tricks could be easily accomplished. If he lived at all, he was trapped.
Perhaps, though, the beacon blaring into Urza’s mind would startle him out of whatever malaise had laid hold of him.
Of course, there was a third possibility. Perhaps Urza had moved on. Perhaps he had gotten what he had wanted out of Tolaria and Shiv and Yavimaya and had gone some fourth place to assemble it all.
Whatever the cause of Urza’s absence, the beacon summoned him. He must return to Tolaria in the next year, or there would be no Tolaria to return to.
The Phyrexians had just discovered a new bridge out of their pit: a deep spring that fed the academy’s wells. One moonless night, they had poured up through every well head and cistern in the academy. The forces of Tolaria rallied and thrust back the monstrous intruders, fighting in their own home as they had fought beyond its walls. The beasts were slain wholesale, grates were affixed over any access to ground water, and new guard posts were created. The Phyrexians had yet to exact their worst death toll. Their dead bodies poisoned the water. Any who drank from the school water supplies in the next days developed a flesh-eating disease that turned their muscles to bloody mush and made bone as brittle as crackers. Twenty-three students and scholars died before the source of the contagion was discovered.
All water for drinking or washing had to be brought from distant wells beyond the school walls. Now, Phyrexians could rise right in the midst of the academy.
The Tolarian fortress had disappeared out from under Barrin. The siege had suddenly turned into a jungle battle—dark, desperate, chaotic, and finally, hopeless.
Barrin’s hand squeezed the jeweled dagger that triggered the beacon. The enchanted item would convey to Urza whatever Barrin saw, whatever he thought—scenes of flesh-eaten friends and over-running foes. Barrin said a silent prayer that Urza lived, and that Urza heard.
* * *
Jhoira paced uneasily before the line of Thran-metal defenders. Just behind her, Diago Deerv marched. His scaly hide bristled with nervousness as she looked over the machines. They were flawless. The original plan of the Tolarian runner had undergone numerous changes, including a more ovoid body, a deeper bend to the legs, and more capacity for armaments. Jhoira had overcome the difficulties of growing metal in this design, and these twelve fighters, if they ever reached Tolaria, could well prove indispensable in its defense.
If they ever reached Tolaria…she had stalled the lizard men for two more years, waiting for Urza to return and broker Karn’s freedom. The man had not returned. Jhoira had decided he was dead. Once the Viashino and goblin tribes decided the same, the tenuous peace of the rig would be at an end.
Worse yet, news of Urza’s long absence had at last reached the ears of the Shivan Drake Gherridarigaaz. She had resumed her strafing attacks on Viashino patrol posts, had cut off trade routes to the Ghitu tribes of the sea shores, and had dropped numerous boulders into the vent shafts above the city. Her son, who had willingly defected to the Viashino cause, decided he wanted to return to her. Apparently he was a typical child runaway, more intent on making a point than on gaining true independence. The Viashino had adamantly held him to his alliance agreement. The young creature went from being their champion to a caged and chained traitor.
What would they do about Urza’s agreement? With the return of the fire drake, half of the bargain Urza offered had fallen through. This morning the other half was in danger.
What would it matter? Jhoira asked herself. If Urza is dead, Tolaria is destroyed, there will be no flying ship, and there will be no hope for Dominaria’s delivery from Phyrexia. If Urza is dead, Shiv might well be the nicest place for Karn and the rest of them to live out what remained of their lives.
The words she spoke were somewhat different. “Excellent work, as always, Diago. You and your workers are extraordinary craftsmen.”
“Judging from your tone, you have no more reason to delay the payment of our price,” Diago said as the two of them reached the end of the line, where Karn stood.
Jhoira’s jaw clenched. Muscles in her temples hardened. “No, Diago. I will delay no longer, but I offer you a different bargain. Instead of taking this one silver golem—nearly half a century old and battered and filled with all kinds of emotional entanglements—I offer you these twelve Thran-metal warriors.”
A harsh edge entered Diago’s eyes. “The agreement was for the silver man.”
“Yes,” Jhoira agreed, “and now I am offering you a different agreement.”
A metallic hiss came from the lizard man’s teeth. “No. We know how to build these creatures. They are not intelligent. We wish to have the silver man, to learn how to build an intelligent creature.”
“But, he’s not just a silver man, Diago,” Jhoira said. “He’s Karn. He has worked beside you all these years. Don’t you care what he wants? Doesn’t it bother you to make him your property, your slave?”
“We all are slaves to the tribe. To serve selflessly is the highest honor,” Diago said. “Yes, he is Karn, a comrade. When he is given to us, he will be part of our tribe. He will be our greatest defender. He will teach us how to make armies of intelligent machines.”
“Karn can’t teach you that,” Jhoira said. “I know more about his construction than he does. Master Malzra’s the only one who really understands his emotional and intellectual abilities. Would you imprison me? Would you imprison Malzra?”
“We do not imprison creatures.”
“What about Rhammidarigaaz?”
“He agreed to join us. And, as for Karn, Malzra agreed to grant him to us,” Diago said. “And Karn can teach us how to build an intelligent machine. The secrets are inside of him. We will gain them….”
“Enough,” Karn said to Jhoira, cutting off her response. “I will go with them. I will teach them what I can. It is the highest honor to serve.”
Open-mouthed, Jhoira watched as the lizard man and the silver man turned and walked away into the depths of the humming mana rig.
Monologue
They are everywhere. We cannot stand. We will not last the day. All will be dead. I still clutch the beacon, yet Urza does not come. We all will be dead.
—Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria
Barrin stood, white-knuckled and wide eyed, in the gorge tower. He clutched the beacon dagger in his hand and gaped as the world disintegrated around him.
A great roaring tide of Phyrexians swept toward the walls. As a whole army, they were terror personified. As individual creatures, they were worse st
ill. Many of the beasts were gigantic, white and meaty, seeming to have taken their forms from the blind shrimp larvae that infested the gorge lake. They scuttled on sharp, darting legs, their scaled hacks hunched in heinous intent over minuscule eye nubs. Barbed antennae tasted the air. The warm brine of human blood drew them on. Others had wolflike figures, all warped and elephantine, with a mane of mange over leathery skin speckled in black and pink. Only their heads diverged from the lupine plan, small, yellow, puffy, and indrawn, like the heads of jaundiced babies. A vast number of the company were human or semi-human, though their bodies had been torqued and tortured into forms unrecognizable—leering death masks of flayed muscle, spidery arms with sinews realigned so that radius and ulna became opposing pincers, rib cages inset with spikes of stone or metal, bellies implanted with poison bladders that splashed foes in acid, hips that were no more than winnowed bone and tarry ligament, and legs that ended in sharpened spikes of bone. Most of the beasts bore weapons stripped from ruined runners or falcons. In a few places, machines of K’rrik’s own design shambled among the monstrous hordes.
“We ourselves have armed them,” Barrin whispered.
Against this onslaught of horror came the defenders of Tolaria. Barrin activated an array of powerstones, linked to mechanisms across the island. What falcons remained streaked down in furious flight. The white vapor trails behind them traced a converging fan across the sky. Impacting along the surging front, the falcons seemed to be allied lightning strikes. They brought with them a vast, rolling thunder. Fiends were hurled back into the chopping jaws of their fellows. The falcons’ incandescent arrival was followed by the ratchet and whine of their shredding mechanisms. Blood—glistening oil and some substance that was bug-black, lime-green, and a shade of lavender that might have been pretty if it weren’t steamy and acidic—fountained amid bounding chunks of meat and bone.
Barrin’s delight at this grisly assault was short-lived. The hordes behind only splashed through the remains of their comrades and pressed the charge. Barrin squeezed the dagger handle and simultaneously signaled the second wave of defenders.
Hundreds of Tolarian runners lunged up from their trenches at the base of the wall. The machines loped into combat, their scythe wings poised to strike. They darted out, long-legged and fearless. The twang and whoosh of quarrels sounded from the ports that lined their bellies. Shafts soaked in anti-oil—a biologic poison designed to separate Phyrexian blood—thudded home in the pelting lines of monsters.
Phyrexians released a corporate shriek that rattled stones and sheared leaves from their branches. Another line of dead and dying went down, these not in a slick slough but a quaking mound of muscle and bone. The monstrous charge followed on, clambering over the fallen.
Tolarian runners met them, striking with twin blades. Some of the beasts were cut in half. Others were torn open at the belly and ran on a few paces before light fled their eyes and they rolled wetly in the dirt. A few were unstoppable. Though runners hung from scythes buried in their bellies, the beasts advanced, dauntless. They and a healthy horde of fiends surged into the waiting phalanx of scorpion engines.
Urza’s scorpions were not designed for speed. With six legs, massive pincers, and darting tails, they were made to stand and fight. They held their position as the beast army fell on them. The first monsters literally fell, legs cut away. Their bleeding bulks dropped atop the stooped shoulders of the scorpions, who merely shrugged them off to snag the next comers. More Phyrexians lost their legs. A third wave leaped onto the backs of the beasts only to be undone by darting tail stingers.
The dead mounded up. In time, the machines’ pincers became pinned beneath tons of oozing flesh. All the while, fiends fought onward into a hail of shafts from human guards on the walls.
Then, the first Phyrexian won through. It was a giant creature with a body as bulbous and pitted as an old gourd. It lunged past furiously stinging tails, rolled over the wall of dead, and crashed mightily against the stone rampart around the school. White arrows stood in a thicket across the beast’s figure, but they did not stay it. The thing lunged again, smashing into the wall. A jagging crack opened from the battlements to the footings. More monsters clambered past the buried scorpions and reached the wall. They added their bulk to the giant’s assaults or scampered up the cut edges of stone or flung tentacular digits to haul themselves over.
In moments, the walls would be breached, Barrin realized. They were already breached. The wells and cisterns poured monsters into the midst of the school. The battlefront had broken into a thousand pieces, and every scholar and every student would fight the legions of hell alone.
Not entirely alone—Barrin’s fingers danced across the glittering gemstones. He called all remaining pumas from their forest posts into the school. He awakened every mechanism in the Hall of Artifact Creatures—from Yotian warriors to Tawnos’s clay men to su-chi loaders and conveyers and logging machines. Every last one would fight today—on this last day of Tolaria.
His summonations done, Barrin turned and descended into the dark spiral that led to the yard below. He would fight, too, with spells and staves and this dagger that had proven no other defense—and even his nails and teeth and bones, if it came to it. When it came to it.
Urza was dead, and soon all of Tolaria would be.
* * *
In the midst of all the shrieking wail of forest fires and trapped animals and tortured elves, the man in the wood heard a greater conflict: Phyrexian cries, macerating machines, whistling arrows, men screaming, children dying, and in the throat of them all echoed one name.
Urza! Urza! Urza!
He knew the name of the Defiler. He knew the Bane of Argoth, but this Urza was a different one—a benevolent creature of great power, a mentor, an advocate, a protector. These voices did not cry out in hatred and rage, but in need and hope, in supplication. They cried out to a very different Urza.
They cried out to him.
In the deafening clamor of their voices, Urza remembered who he was.
The mind of the forest pressed in upon him with sudden violence, straining to quell the thought. After five years of torture and penance, Yavimaya’s fury was spent. The forest had come to know the man it had so hated. It had subsumed him into its web of life. No, Yavimaya’s fury was spent, and its rage was nothing beside the fury of the battle that summoned Urza.
He forced back the mind of the wood. He recomposed his being from the drifting shreds of it within the vast tree. He brought his mind into sudden, keen focus.
Yavimaya made one final grab at him. Multani, the soul of Yavimaya, impelled himself into the form of the awakening planeswalker. He fused with the forming figure, struggling to root him in place, but it was too late.
Urza vanished from the heart of the tree. He was suspended for only a sliver of time in the fold between worlds, but during that moment he could feel a presence imprisoned within him: Multani. In a single instant, his captor had become his captive.
There was no time to think of Multani. Urza stepped from the wheel of eternities into a precise moment, a precise space. Walls of ancient, gray metal took shape around him. Large windows of dark glass, levers and gears, fire belching from glowing forges. It all came into being. None of these things mattered; only the sharp-eyed and dark-skinned Ghitu woman in their midst mattered. She had been crouched over a set of plans, arguing some point with a gesticulating goblin, when Urza arrived.
Jhoira whirled about, slack-jawed.
“Gather your best fighters. Tolaria is overrun. I will return and take you there.”
He was already fading from being before his orders were complete. The shocked stare of Jhoira followed Urza into the spinning spaces. He sensed a similar amazement from Multani. That amazement redoubled the next moment as Urza stepped into the chaos of Tolaria.
The walls were breached. The guards along them were merely boneless heaps or red streaks on wh
ite stone. Phyrexians poured like roaches through the gaps. They flooded up from shattered grates hurriedly fastened over well heads. They swarmed through burst doorways and down stone corridors. They fought those who could resist and fastened teeth on those who couldn’t. Throughout Urza’s field of sight, monsters tossed students and scholars like white rags.
Urza rose from the dirt where his feet had alighted for a moment. He floated straight into the air and unleashed red bolts down the ring of wells in the main courtyard. The blasts of energy sailed down the throats of the channels. They flashed past the shadowy forms that scuttled upward. At the waterline, a sudden inferno erupted. Red water and black-charred bodies geysered from the wells. The ground around each well head mounded up in swollen distress. In the next moment, rock and mortar and dirt cascaded down into fire-fused plugs. The wells were closed. The Phyrexians below would drown.
Urza spun about and cast another sorcery. Red beams darted out to each jagged breach in the walls. Limestone grew molten. It folded over the creatures struggling through the gap. It solidified. The wall was once again whole.
Urza kept rising. He hurled more fire outward, rings of the stuff. Force hissed from his hands in arcs of steam and coalesced over the walls to sweep away the raging throng. The vanguard of the attack turned to black statues and then sifting ash. Flames broke out in a great ball. Dancing orange fire shimmered across the black surge and headed toward the verges of the forest.
Still the killer, aren’t you? said a mind within Urza. You would slay ever, bird and beast to kill the creatures that oppose you.
The wall of fire whirled in one last red roar before dissipating, not singeing so much as a leaf tip. The accuser within fell conspicuously silent. Urza allowed himself a small smile—until the next wave of monsters emerged from the eaves of the woods and stomped forward among twisted bodies and piles of dust.
Time Streams Page 25
