Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  “Open the superfluid manifold,” Karn ordered.

  He pivoted both handles inward, and felt the mechanisms engage and lock. A great warmth was abruptly born within the engine. In moments, it had drowned out the ovation outside.

  Before Karn could withdraw his arms, bracers emerged from deep within the machine and fastened over his wrists. Small wire probes slid smoothly into the joints in his knuckles. Magnificent surges of energy prickled along his hands. Jolts moved up arm and shoulder conduits, converged in the silver man’s chest, and fountained into the powerstone at the center of his head.

  Suddenly Karn could sense the green superfluids coursing through the great engine block before him. He could feel the warm bath sluice around the glimmering powerstone at the heart of the machine. He could see out the fog-lanterns of the ship, fore and aft, starboard and port. He could kinesthetically sense the weight and alignment of the ship’s hull, its sails, its lines, even its young, strong captain as she stood at the ship’s wheel. The airship had become a second body for him. Its engines and controls and defenses were suddenly his own.

  Integration.

  To welling cheers, Karn lifted the great skyship into the air. It rose amid the red-flapping wings of the fire drakes. It ascended into the bright skies over Tolaria, the bright skies of Dominaria.

  * * *

  Jhoira felt small and overawed as she stood on the bridge of the airship. As yet, there was no need to steer. The vessel was merely rising into the blue Tolarian sky. Not until it made headway would the warping of sails and the bending of airfoils make any difference at all to the craft’s movement. But clutching the wheel now made a definite difference to Jhoira’s position: it allowed her to stay standing.

  Beneath her feet, enormous, hot engines labored. They dragged into clear air a payload of five hundred war engines and a crew of thirty. She tried to forget that the fully loaded ship weighed four thousand tons. She tried to forget that this was the vessel’s first time aloft—its shakedown cruise. She tried to forget that she would be sailing this vessel into a war with angels.

  Something huge and red arced with sudden violence above the ship’s rail and then disappeared again. It returned, a leathery mountain, translucent—the bones of a great drake visible through it. The wing dipped a second time. When it reappeared, it brought the red-mantled head of Gherridarigaaz above the rail. A gray snort escaped one craggy nostril as the she-drake pulled herself higher into the sky. Urza, standing in his saddle, lurched into view. He held something in his hand, something that looked like a club but sparkled like a wand. His face was clenched with effort, and he drove the drake toward the prow of the ship.

  Something is wrong, Jhoira thought, clinging to the wheel. Something has come loose—or something that was supposed to come loose hasn’t.

  Gherridarigaaz surged toward the bow of the ship. Urza leaned so far in the saddle he appeared in danger of falling. He swung the shimmering club at something clinging to the prow. A dull thud sounded, and then a wet shattering sound.

  “I name thee, Weatherlight,” Urza declared, holding aloft the fragmented neck of the bottle. His mount soared away over windswept treetops.

  Jhoira laughed. There was no monster, nothing amiss. The planeswalker was merely blessing and naming the boat on its maiden voyage. Jhoira felt the weight of dread and impossible futures sag away from her and drop among the rattling leaves below. She laughed.

  “Full ahead! Follow that drake,” the first captain of Weatherlight commanded.

  Gherridarigaaz darted out over the forests of Tolaria. Rhammidarigaaz slid into her wake. Weatherlight followed them both. Wind coursed over the prow and back to reach Jhoira. She drew the fresh air into her lungs and remembered another place she used to stand—at the edge of her world. She remembered an earlier time, when young courage filled her heart and she dreamed of a soul mate. The man had never arrived, but she had lived a full life without him, and now, young courage poured again into her heart.

  Gherridarigaaz was merely a crimson jag on the horizon. Rhammidarigaaz was just behind her. Weatherlight gained on them both. The helm had grown active in Jhoira’s grip, tugging at her the way an eager horse pulls at the rein. She returned its forceful play, holding the ship against cross winds.

  “Trim the sails,” Jhoira commanded the human crew. They scampered to cleats and drew on lines. “Reconfigure the port and starboard fans into airfoils.” More workers clambered onto the lateral rigs to rework the canvas.

  With each tug on slack lines and each shift of sail, the ship gained speed. It coursed above the green sea of trees with greater velocity than any water-bound craft. A turgid wake of tossing tree-tops spread out aft. The wind washing over the deck threatened to blow the lighter crew members overboard. Terd and his diminutive comrades hunkered down beside the rail. Lines throughout the rig hummed in the bluster. The ship’s hull creaked as it eased itself into the stresses of its new orientation.

  Jhoira smiled. She had almost caught up to Urza and Barrin. At the shoreline of Tolaria, the drake riders nudged their steeds to match the ship’s speed. Gherridarigaaz and Rhammidarigaaz flew wing and wing. Churning storms of air spread in twin cones behind them. Jhoira steered the ship past the shore and into the twin gales. Wind lashed brutally across the deck.

  “Hang on!” Jhoira shouted to her crew. “We will slow once we enter Serra’s Realm.”

  Until that time, they had to fly in close formation. Urza’s planeshift would barely encompass both drakes, and it could be tracked by Weatherlight’s apparatus only if the field effects overlapped. Whitecaps thundered below, and gray cumulus clouds thundered above. The very air seemed to turn solid, tearing at sail-cloth and hemp, wooden hull and metal fittings. It clawed also at the captain at her wheel, but now she felt only exhilaration.

  A bubble of magical might swelled out from Urza. In a heartbeat, it stretched to encompass both drakes. Already they shimmered, punching into the portal.

  “Planeshift!” shouted Jhoira.

  Another bubble welled up from the heart of the ship itself. The curtain of magic cracked out, whiplike, and dimmed sea and sky. Blue Dominaria glimmered for one tiny moment more, and then it was gone. The roar went with it. Black chaos swept in to displace all. Beyond the ship’s rails lay only a churning world of emptiness, and the laboring wings of two great drakes.

  And then blue and black both were gone. In their place came a vast skyscape of tinged light, sulfuric cloud, and troubled, tumbled chunks of land.

  “Serra’s Realm,” Jhoira said into the sudden roar of wind, the edge of Serra’s Realm. She reached down to a slot in the deck and drew forth a glass-encased map of the Jumbles. The cartography was unmistakably Urza’s—detailed, turbulent, overworked. It showed three landmark isles. One was pear-shaped, and it tumbled in rapid succession. Another was long and flat like a great stone knife. The third, lying just beneath the descending brow of sky at the utter edge of Serra’s Realm, was the rock called Jabboc.

  There, on that distant and broken world, in a colony called Arizon, waited a thousand souls.

  “Start a rapid swing round to starboard on heading ninety-five, three twenty-eight, eight. We’re heading for Jabboc.” Steersmen trimmed in the airfoils and Karn, below, channeled what remained of the ship’s power into the banking descent. “Release spider bombards from alternate sides every thirty seconds beginning on my mark.” The bombard crews scrambled to load their first salvos.

  Meanwhile, Terd clambered up the ladder to the main deck and grabbed at Jhoira’s sleeve. “They are here already, Lady. Lightning bugs!”

  Jhoira peered out along the line of the goblin’s gnarled finger. To port, she glimpsed a beautiful and terrible sight. Glimmering in air like gold dust, were the cleansing armies of Radiant.

  “Mark!”

  * * *

  “They’ve released the first spider bombard,” shouted Barrin. He
brought Rhammidarigaaz through a sweeping turn to the flank of Urza.

  “Good,” Urza called back from atop Gherridarigaaz. “We’ll know who we’re fighting.” He looked to his left, where the cleansing army of Radiant swarmed, their wings making a distant drone in the air.

  “How many do you think there are?”

  “Hundreds,” Urza called back, “perhaps thousands. We will need every advantage.”

  Urza flung out his hands, drawing to himself the white mana of the many places he had traveled in the realm. He fueled a pair of powerful spells. White lightning crackled out from his fingers and spread across the two drakes, feathering around them in a thousand leaping lines. Power surged through them. The enchantment made scales seem gossamer feathers, made red mantles seem rainbowed coronas. There was a sudden glorious aspect laid on the beasts. They were transformed into divine figures, terrifying in their beauty and power. With another gathering of white-mana magic, Urza cast a scintillating aura around each rider, a whirling circle of what appeared to be snow.

  “That will protect us from white-mana spells or creatures,” Urza explained.

  Barrin, unfamiliar with the realm, drew on blue magic instead of white. He summoned a pair of Tolarian drakes. Giant kin of fire drakes, these two dragons had skin as smooth and translucent as reef water. Their wings flashed blue against the yellowing clouds. Their spiky manes, as barbed as tridents, oscillated in the roaring wind. Barrin reached into the core of his memory, tapping memories of the forests of Tolaria. He thought of Jhoira’s Angelwood and the Western Reaches and the many fast-time subarctic scrub forests, and cast an enchantment on the two creatures. Green scales sprouted across the backs and bellies of the summoned drakes, providing them additional protection against attacks, magical or mundane.

  “Impressive,” shouted Urza over the growing buzz of angel wings approaching.

  “I have a leviathan up my sleeve, if things get really desperate, though summoning it would tax my every reserve.”

  There was no time for more discussion. The approaching army’s drone had become a roar. They grew from golden motes into arrows of flame.

  The angel army of Radiant arrived.

  They soared in with the speed of falcons. Two score archangels led the vanguard, each bearing a magna sword, broad as an axe but long as a lance. The archangels came in a vertical circle and held their blades inward like a ring of fangs. Behind them, forming a lethal gullet, were hundreds of angel warriors bearing lances. A great leviathan in its own right, the cleansing army of Radiant opened its toothy maw to swallow the drakes and their riders.

  “I’ll meet you on the other side!” Urza yelled as he plunged into the hailstorm of white fangs and silver masks and flashing steel.

  The other side of what? Barrin wondered.

  The angel thicket closed around him.

  Magna swords struck the tip of the fire drake’s pale muzzle and sparked along its scaly neck. The enchantments held, repelling steel. Even so, the blades converged, tracing their way toward the rider.

  Barrin yanked hard on the drake’s rein. Rhammidarigaaz curved broadside to the speeding angels. His leeward flank arched away from attack, and his windward flank became an impenetrable wall against which archangels and angels smashed in bloody wreck. Barrin urged Rhammidarigaaz back into his charge. The beast surged his wings, flinging loose a pair of angels who had swarmed up behind him, and vaulted deeper into the throat of the attack. He breathed a great gout of fiery breath into the onslaught, and angels fell from the sky like burning pigeons. Rhammidarigaaz plowed into the vacated space.

  The dragon’s side was dotted with blood, most of it angelic, though there were a few long wounds where swords had broken through the enchantments. Instantly, Barrin cast a healing spell on the drake, and the gory gashes along his sides, knitted together with threads of white energy.

  Another blast of fire emerged from the beast. More angels tumbled in black smoke and melted quill. Silver masks cleaved to screaming faces. Magna swords fused with skeletons.

  Distant in the fight, the flames of Gherridarigaaz carved an equally hellish swath through the swarm of angels.

  The blue drakes fared less well. Their steam breath killed many, but the press of bodies and the hack of swords ripped the creatures to rags. A bolt of healing radiance leapt from Urza toward the beleaguered Tolarian drakes, but another sorcery, cast by an archangel warrior, deflected the spell en route.

  Barrin was beginning his own healing enchantment when an angel choir shrieked down upon him and laid to with swords. A familiar sorcery leapt from his fingertips. The kindled fire arced across the pitching air into the face of an angel warrior, waking flames in her mouth and eyes. He unleashed a second spell of the same kind, drawing additional power from the first. A third conflagration blazed out to strike an archangel, blasting a hole through its armor and out the other side. Three bodies tumbled away, but twenty more clung to the drake’s back and attacked with swords and barbed whips.

  Massive blades descended. They struck Barrin in head, neck, belly, and back. Magna swords rebounded from his enchanted flesh as though they had struck stone.

  Barrin sent Rhammidarigaaz into a sudden dive, flinging free the attackers and bringing the beast’s fire breath against new clouds of the foe. Exhilaration moved through the Mage Master of Tolaria—until he saw the bleeding hulks of the Tolarian drakes.

  They were below and behind, their carapace enchantments dispelled, and their blue hides marked with gashes as numerous and ominous as hieroglyphics. The killer angels still clung to the beasts, maggots on dead corpses, until their wings at last gave out. In quick succession, the summoned beasts dropped from the sky. Angels peeled themselves from the falling forms.

  Chastened, Barrin brought Rhammidarigaaz soaring back into the fray, fiery breath and steel-hard wings slaying angels in their hundreds. The master mage cast sorceries, death blossoming all around him. He would kill as many as he could as quickly as he could, hoping to keep them from the refugees.

  Suddenly, black and grotesque in the midst of that angel throng, there came a beast that could win right past Barrin’s white mana protections. Bewinged, befanged, and Phyrexian, the monster dropped like night from the sky onto Rhammidarigaaz’s neck. It reared up, and Barrin recognized the lemon-wedge eyes Urza had described.

  The man otherwise was utterly transformed—his figure hulking and muscular, fitted with countless implants and weapons—halberd arms and dagger-tipped feet and scythes at the elbows. The greatest weapon of all, though, was built right into the beast’s torso—a black manifold that blazed in twelve places with the white-blue fires of soul-stealers. He drew white mana into his very being, storing it, harnessing part of it to transform himself. He grew more powerful with every creature he killed.

  Gorig was the mana battery.

  Barrin had time to see no more. Gorig lunged atop him.

  * * *

  Karn felt Weatherlight’s fading power as a torpor in his own frame. The soul torches weren’t gathering enough white mana from the surrounding air to recharge the stone. It only glimmered weakly within its superfluid bath. The ship had enough energy to fly, perhaps enough for a few brief bursts from its ray weapons, but the vessel would not planeshift again.

  “We’ll need more torches, Jhoira,” he called into the speaking tube over his head. The sound of his voice was empty and weary, made doubly so by the metal pipe work. “Just to carry the refugees away, we’ll need power from more torches.”

  “Aye,” came the clipped reply from above. “Prepare for landing.”

  Below the ship—Karn still saw all the world through the ray weapons at bow and stern—the aerial island called Jabboc floated black and forbidding against the descending dome of Serra’s Realm. It was a dark place. The eternal light of Serra was failing in these reaches. The life-giving air was thin and tainted. The very edge of the plane hovered
only a scant mile beyond the black rock. In everchanging array, its frayed fabric showed the gray chaos that lay between worlds.

  “Reduce speed,” Jhoira’s order came.

  Gratefully, Karn scaled back the power flow from the tepid crystal.

  “Decrease altitude.”

  Sails shifted, the prow rose just slightly, and the ship’s keel eased downward. The massive aerial island swelled to fill Karn’s field of vision. He saw there a twilight roil of hills and rocks. Dead fields lay gray within the perpetual murk. Tangled trees stood in dead woods across the isle. It seemed Hades or Sheol, a place of shadows, sunless land of the dead.

  “Lanterns ahoy! Bring the ship to ground beside those lights.”

  Through the eyes of the ship. Karn saw the flickering glow of lanterns, oil and wick pushing back the darkness. The tepid light traced out arches against the dark—the entry to the Arizon colony. Light reflected in tiny gleams from something clustered within. They seemed almost wasp eggs, piled inside the mud-daubers’ nest, but with a certain wonder and dread, Karn realized what they were—

  Faces, thousands of faces—waiting and hoping for salvation.

  Karn drew upon the strength of his own power matrix to bear the ship across the cold reaches before the cave. A black vale below led past a field of rubble and a forest deadfall. The Weatherlight nosed through the tangle of trees and to the flat plain, just below the cave. Landing spines emerged from the lower sweep of the hull. Easing the ship slowly down. Karn felt in his own being the vast shudder of the hull settling.

  “Open hatches! Release falcons! Deploy runners and pumas and scorpions! Ready cargo holds! Ready ray weapons!” There was a new urgency in Jhoira’s voice.

  When Karn peered through the stern lanterns, he saw why.

  Angel armies descended on them in a golden cyclone.

  * * *