The Thran

by J. Robert King

  The colossus galloped on knuckles and knees out onto the battlefield, hundreds dying with each footfall. Another behemoth came on the heels of the first. It too stormed toward the terrified invaders.

  The first behemoth surged into the Thran lines. It crushed dwarves with every step. Its claws eviscerated whole phalanxes of minotaurs. It seized a flying ship, bit through its keel, reached up into the hold, and yanked forth the powerstone core. The war caravel fell from the sky in a rush of sparks and splinters.

  Meanwhile, the second behemoth headed up a charge of Halcyte guards. With no more care than a child crumpling and flinging blades of grass, the behemoth clutched up elves, crunched them in its claws, and hurled their broken bodies back atop the guards. Streaks of crimson marked the helms and vambraces of those who could not avoid the falling bodies. As if shooing away insects, the Halcyte guards sloughed the dying forms and marched onward.

  “They’ll be out of elves soon enough,” Yawgmoth told himself contentedly. “Elves fight like popped corn. I’d like to see this behemoth really fight.”

  He got his wish. The gray behemoth’s claws were suddenly full of writhing metal—artifact creatures. Many were mantis warriors. Others had the configuration of humans. Still more were conglomerate creatures, with curved backs and scuttling legs and scythes that emerged from their sides. The behemoth lifted a fragile-looking mantis warrior and crushed it in one claw. It snatched up a second and smashed it in the other. Thousands of servos groaned as the behemoth flung out its arms in tandem and hurled the mantises free.

  Except the mantises did not fly free. Broken though they were, their legs and pincers still held on. They writhed but not in spasmodic destruction. Legs moved purposefully, clawing down the behemoth’s uplifted arms. It struggled to shake the things loose, to no avail. More artifact creatures climbed up its legs. They were roaches swarming a bloodied figure. They tore at it, covered it, overwhelmed it.

  “Damn,” Yawgmoth said. “Must be Glacian’s designs.”

  In moments, the behemoth was completely covered in spidery artifacts. It staggered a few paces more and then toppled facefirst into the ranks of clockwork warriors.

  Halcyte guards drove forward, intent on liberating the fallen beast.

  “No!” Yawgmoth shouted, touching stones in the box schematic. “No! Clear away.”

  It was too late. A high keen began. Springs wound beyond their constitutional capacity. The gray hide of the behemoth split and flung back. From beneath, thousands of metal sinews lashed out, slaying all those around. Whiplike, they shattered artifact creatures and Halcyte guards both. Blue-gray steel whipped. Silver armor severed. Red blood flowed.

  “Damned Halcyte guards,” Yawgmoth snarled. “They all ought to be Phyrexians.”

  This battle would last longer than a blazing moment. It mattered little. Yawgmoth had planned for a long engagement. His forces would hold—the Halcyte guard and Phyrexian guard, the fleet, the artifact engines….

  “While the Thran Alliance is so occupied, I’ll go on the offensive.”

  In the mountains beyond the invading armies lay a largely ignored target. It was arguably the greatest achievement of the Thran College of Artificers—a massive broadcast station that allowed the college to monitor every artifact creature in the Thran Empire. It could also shut down any mechanism that went rogue. Unknown to all but Yawgmoth, the station could even command those creatures.

  Yawgmoth would capture the broadcast station, the Null Sphere—and with it, he would command the Thran artifact army.

  Smiling wickedly, Yawgmoth set his hand beneath the control stone of his sedan chair. The craft rose, silent and smooth, from the bunker and shot toward the city above. His personal war caravel waited there, his personal crew.

  They would capture the Null Sphere. They would command the artifact engines of the empire. Yawgmoth would crush the Thran and their barbarian allies and bring all of Dominaria to its knees.

  Nine Years Before the Thran-Phyrexian War…

  Glacian loved the darkness and sulphur. He loved the massive machines. Gigantic cams rotated in volcanic vents. Shafts hissed with superheated steam. Boilers growled ceaselessly. Fires belched from smelters. Crystal orbs glowed incandescent. Glacian loved the Halcyon mana rig—vast and subterranean, sunk within a dormant volcano, suffused with the raw energy of the world.

  He was the only one in the city who truly understood these machines—in the city and in the world! Glacian was the greatest artificer in an empire of great artificers. This, his design, was ten times as powerful, one hundred times as efficient, and one quarter the size of the rig at Shiv. Glacian was the only one in the world who understood these machines, and the machines returned the favor. They were the only ones who understood Glacian.

  “No! No! You festering scab!” Glacian said, cuffing a much-abused goblin on the back of the head. “Bleed vents five and nine, not four and seven! You want to blow up the whole rig? You want to blast Halcyon from the face of the globe!”

  “Bleed five and eight,” the jangled creature said, struggling to count on hands one finger short.

  “Not five and eight! Five and nine! Count your thumbs, too!” Glacian growled, whapping the creature again. The man’s hair had gone prematurely gray from dealing with creatures such as this one. Though he was only forty, Glacian seemed fifty-five. Short, skinny, and stooped, he was a craven creature suited for the sulphuric darkness he loved. “Go! Get out of here! I’ll do it myself! Go! Keep going until you reach the Caves of the Damned! You’ll be more useful to them roasted on a stick than you are to me.”

  That much was untrue. As at Shiv, this machinery was designed to be run by goblins. The crawlspaces would not admit humans. Though plenty of Thran artificers had helped build the rig, no Thran were willing to work in the broiling blackness, forever at risk of searing to the side of a blast furnace. The citizens of Halcyon would not deign descend from their floating paradise above, even though their paradise was held aloft by the powerstones from the rig. Neither could the prisoners in the Caves of the Damned ascend to work the rig. Only goblins had an affinity for the dark spaces. Only goblins would put up with the rancorous Glacian. Even his own apprentices disliked their teacher. It was just as well. Glacian preferred the company of goblins.

  Glacian stalked across the floor amid steaming stacks and clanging grilles. He reached the vent-gauge matrix. A tepid flame burned dismally above the sooty array, casting dim light down. Glacian fetched a filthy rag from a nearby hook and wiped the grit from the gauges. Checking levels, he bled pressure from vents five and nine, bringing them into line.

  “The little muckers could use a few more fingers. They’re constantly losing them under the orbs.” A deep rumble began in the passage beyond the machines. “Ah, there’s one just now.”

  Glacian strode toward the sound, past flanks of sweating steel. He knew every contour of these vast devices. He’d seen them all in his head months before anyone had seen them in reality. Schematics forever cascaded through his mind. He thought in three-dimensional layouts as others thought in words. An idea for a new engine could be born at the beginning of a breath and be fully formed and articulated in his mind before he exhaled. It was only his hands that slowed him down. He couldn’t set his ideas to paper fast enough. People slowed him even more. A third of his inventions remained unbuilt for lack of money and a third more for lack of desire. The final third appeared around him just as this vast rig had—one moment of inspiration realized over a long decade by a thousand workers. The very heart of that inspiration rolled just ahead.

  Glacian emerged from among the machines. He entered a long corridor with a padded groove down its center. The groove sloped gently down toward the crystal charging chamber to his left. To his right, a glorious vision approached. Out of the darkness loomed a gigantic crystalline orb. It was perfectly smooth. A solid sphere of crystal, the orb would measure twenty feet
in diameter and would weigh over a hundred tons. Glacian knew these facts instinctively. He rarely thought of facts when he saw the vast globes roll toward the charging chamber. He thought instead of beauty. It was his one true connection to beauty—

  Except for the ubiquitous goblins that impelled it on its way. They thrust crude wooden staves beneath the orb, some behind to roll it forward, and some before to slow it down. Glacian could have provided them with an engineered tool, but wood was soft enough not to scratch crystal. Goblin bone was not.

  “Get out of the way!” Glacian shouted, striding toward the work crews. He yanked one of the little creatures from its staff, which was caught beneath the advancing sphere. “Watch your claws, you little dung beetle! You want that thing to roll over you?”

  Glacian had strictly forbidden workers from being caught beneath orbs. Still, every month another one was crushed, marring an orb with tooth and bone scratches. Glacian often wished for a draught that would soften goblin teeth and bones, preventing such damage, but the dark arts of medicine were forbidden since the civil war.

  “Let the staff go,” he advised the goblin and dragged him back among the machines. “It’ll be splinters after the orb is past it.” Man and monster stood side by side as the huge ball rolled past. The thing was three and a half times Glacian’s height. Even in its smooth track, it shook the floor. “A single orb that will break into a thousand powerstones. A thousand stones charged in a single irradiation.” He shook his head, laughing. “They’re glad to get a hundred stones a month from the rig in Shiv.”

  A mewling sound came from goblin at his side. “Aww. Wouldja lookit that? Aww, dammit!”

  “What?” asked Glacian. “What?”

  “Lookit my stick.” The thing lay, pulverized, in the track. “Dammit.”

  Glacian pushed the critter aside. “Typical scrot! A priceless jewel rolls past you, but all you see is a line of sawdust.”

  “Dammit,” the goblin agreed, kicking at the splinters. “Dammit.”

  Glacian shook his head. Goblins were only slightly less perceptive than the average citizen of Halcyon above. Were it not for Glacian’s dark machines, his hellish rig, and its incomprehensible minions, none of the city’s heavenly splendor would exist. This very orb was destined to provide the foundation stones of the Thran Temple, the loftiest building in all the city. Though the people of Halcyon lived on, in, and because of Glacian’s work, they resented and distrusted him all the same.

  Ignoring the despondent goblin, Glacian followed in the wake of the rolling orb. Goblin teams prodded it past humming machines and into the chamber at the corridor’s end. The space centered on a six-foot circular well in the floor. Atop this well, the orb settled. The curving walls contained similar holes, each leading to shafts that would admit sunlight from mirror arrays across the desert. The rest of the chamber was silvered, so that none of the light energy of the sun or the heat energy of the volcano would be lost. Even the vast curved door that had admitted them was mirrored within.

  Glacian walked about the globe. Chattering goblins polished it with long cloths. The man meanwhile stared into the depths of the stone. So deep, so perfect a crystal was black at its center. Whatever light streamed into it was diverted around its heart. The future lay there, in that unseeable center. It was but ten feet away through clear crystal, and yet it might have been the hidden core of another world.

  “All right, that’s enough,” Glacian said to the goblins. Any dust or oil on the outside of the stone would be flash-burned in the first moments of irradiation. “Clear the chamber. Secure the door.”

  As goblins poured from the space, jabbering, Glacian withdrew to a curved stair. He climbed it. The steps followed the outer edge of the charging chamber. At the top lay a small room—his control room. Within was a solitary seat before a powerstone console. A small black portal peered into the charging chamber. Only when bombarded with energy enough to melt basalt would the mirrored window give any glimpse of what occurred within.

  Glacian seated himself before the console. A cluster of speaking tubes emerged from its center. He flipped the tubes open. At the base of each rested a gleaming powerstone that would convey his words over yards and miles.

  “Lock down the doors!”

  “Doors locked down,” came the reply.

  “Slide thermal hatches!”

  “Hatches sliding.”

  “Open spectral channels!”

  “Channels opening.”

  “Align mirror arrays three, six, and nine!”

  “Arrays aligning.”

  The wall of the control chamber began to buzz, and a dim twinkle pierced the blackened glass.

  “Align arrays two, five, and eight.”

  The light intensified. Shafts around the chamber poured light into the orb. Heat energy blazed up from below.

  “Align arrays one, four, and seven.”

  The glow grew intense. Fingers of light and fire reached into the black heart of the orb. The secret center that once bent light away from it could no longer hold back the brilliant flood. The stone beamed like a second sun. Volcanic heat spread upward through the crystal. It rumbled and rattled. The glare was unbearable, but Glacian did not look away.

  This was his very mind—immense and perfect, shot through with a power so magnificent it could not hold it.

  Cracks spread through the crystal like lightning through the sun. Jagged fissures rushed from the heart outward in all directions. The fissures met and multiplied along fracture lines. Soon what was ragged became regular. Instead of uneven shards of stone, the great orb was splitting into perfect jewels—tetrahedrons, hexahedrons, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, icosahedrons….They were packed into tight, concentric shells all through the vast orb. Where the geometry of the space would not permit regular solids, other glimmering shapes appeared—briolettes in a starburst around the inner core and marquise gems proliferating across the outer edge. Some were the size of heads, some of hearts, some of eyes, and some of tiny teeth, but each was a perfect form.

  All those facets caught the light—a thousand new lenses and a hundred thousand new mirrors. It intensified again. The orb trembled violently. If it broke apart now, all those stones would be only so many hunks of fine-cut glass, but if the sphere held together a moment more—

  “To cling past impossibility,” Glacian whispered avidly. His own eyes glared with the fury of the transformation. “What a vision.”

  He slammed an inch-thick visor over the window—just in time. The light that burst into being beyond was enough to shine through solid steel and clearly outline his own finger bones in upheld hands.

  Within the chamber, enough raw energy sluiced to energize every separate stone in the orb. The facets remained, perfect and immutable, but the material within each stone was transformed from matter into pure energy. A stone the size of a tooth could light a whole room. A stone the size of an eye could propel a sedan chair around the city. A stone the size of a heart could heat a home in even the coldest winter. A stone the size of a head could send caravels racing through the sky. A stone the size of a man could provide a foundation for an aerial temple—the Thran Temple.

  Glacian stood. There was no more to see. Every gauge across his console rattled in overload. The shuttered window beamed like a hundred torches. The speaking tubes roared with reports from crews far and near. Glacian ignored it all. If all was right, the chamber now held a thousand powerstones. If even a single fault occurred, the implosion would gut the whole mana rig and bring the city crashing down. There was no stopping the process now.

  Glacian opened the door to the control room and placidly descended the stairs. The stone wall beside him, ten feet thick, blazed with light and radiated heat that curled the hairs on his arm. He whistled happily. By the time he reached the base of the stairs, the reaction was waning. Broiling air hissed from release valves all around the chamber
and would have killed any creature who stood in the wrong spot. Glacian set his hand in the latch. With gentle pressure, he released the seal. The door flung wide.

  There, before him, the massive orb stood. It gleamed brilliantly, a thousand charged powerstones in matrix before their creator. Tiny lines of smoke hissed up from every crack to circle ominously against the mirrored ceiling above. Glacian drew in the scent of them. It was a sharp and killing odor, the smell of lightning just before it strikes.

  A goblin brought him a wooden staff, as the creature had been trained to do. Glacian lifted it overhead and brought the staff down on the twenty-foot sphere. Gemstones cascaded. They made bell tones as they slid down around their maker. Glacian stood in the gleaming flood of them. He thought how these stones—the largest of the thousand—would bear up the temple his love was building.

  Yes, it was not merely the machines and stones that understood Glacian the genius. It was also his beloved, Rebbec.

  As the crystals settled to the floor around him, Glacian muttered to the goblin, “Behold!”

  Only it wasn’t a goblin. The rank and decrepit figure beside him was human—an Untouchable from the Caves of the Damned. They escaped their deep prison whenever they could, sneaked up into the rig like curious rats. This one leered up, his eyes lit with animal fury. He clutched one of the new powerstones in his hand.

  “Welcome to the company of the damned!” The twisted little man rammed that perfect stone into Glacian’s belly. In the next moments, there was only thrashing and blood and the dim recognition that the Untouchables were rioting through the rig.

  Glacian slumped down, bleeding atop the glimmering stones he had made.

  There was not to be blood on these gleaming crystals. There was not to be blood on the foundation stones of the Thran Temple.

  “Forgive me, Rebbec. Forgive me.”

  * * *

  —

  Rebbec rushed down the infirmary halls to a junction. She paused and raked disheveled blonde hair from her eyes.