The Thran

by J. Robert King

  “Should we go down after him?”

  “No. You’ll not catch him. Besides, he is useful to me. Predictable. He’ll lead more refugees up here. We’ll capture each batch. The council will grant us more soldiers, more funding….” Yawgmoth said grimly. “No. He is useful to me alive….These five are useful dead—the first fruits of the new campaign. The council will be pleased.”

  Gix heard it all, fetched up breathless beneath the grate. He feared to move, lest the patter of water betray him. He remained as the assassins hauled away the dead. Only after they were gone did he realize that the trickle that fell on his back was not rain but blood.

  Yawgmoth and Rebbec walked through the half-completed temple. Rebbec pointed overhead to her newest innovation—a network of powerstones that hovered throughout the structure. During the day, they were dark, absorbing the light of the sun. At night, they beamed brightly, chasing away ghosts.

  “We have no need of moonlight or starlight anymore. The temple will be our light. It will cast a gentle glow over all the streets, even the dark alleys.” Rebbec paused. Her lovely figure lingered sadly in gemstone reflection all around. “With more light, perhaps your engagements will not so often turn deadly.”

  In the powerstones, Yawgmoth’s image was a shadow that loomed over Rebbec. “We kill only in self-defense, when an Untouchable tries to kill us.”

  “I know,” Rebbec said. “You’re fighting an undeclared war, and every war has its casualties. I just want to be sure you aren’t one of the casualties.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “If you’re worried about your husband’s health, he’s mostly in the hands of his goblins and machines now. Were I to die—”

  “No, it’s not Glacian….Well, of course I’m worried about him—his paranoid delusions, his army of goblin helpers, his split brain. He’s deteriorated so much since our return, only a few goblins and I can understand him anymore. Of course I’m worried….” She walked again, wrenching her hands in uncertainty. Reaching the western facade, she gazed beyond canyons of crystal. The world dropped away fifteen hundred feet to the vast desert. Only the occasional fleck of an air-caravel shone in the huge expanse. “But I’m just as worried about you.”

  Yawgmoth strode up beside her. “About me?”

  Rebbec shook her head, abstracted. “With Glacian lost in delusion, you’re the only one who shares my beliefs about destiny.” She took a trembling breath. “Here we are on the threshold to a future without want, without disease, without war. We’re poised to step free of the weighty world, but it claws at us. Want and disease and war reach out of the black heart of the world to drag us down.”

  Yawgmoth shrugged. “Struggle and torment created Halcyon, not art and beauty as you suppose. It is the way creatures change and adapt. Only in the face of death do living things strive to transcend. War, plague, famine—these are the birth pangs of new empires. Of course you are fearful. You are midwifing a new people into being.”

  Rebbec leaned against him, drawing the warm scent of him into her lungs. “I told you, you are the only one I can talk to anymore.”

  * * *

  —

  Glacian was miserable. His skin would slough off at a touch. His fingernails split and peeled away. His hair fell out in clumps. Under its own weight, his mind had split in two. Holes filled his memory. What he could remember were bitter arguments and long loneliness among machines and goblins.

  Rebbec hadn’t visited him all day. Every time he upbraided her for her absences, she claimed she had visited, that he had only forgotten. She refused to relay his instructions to the mana rig, refused to monitor the works of the artifice colleges in the other city-states, and even criticized him for making war on “the man who is trying to save your life!” She was less understanding than a goblin.

  “Not enough breath. Adjust the bellows. Adjust the bellows!” It was what Glacian had meant to say, though the feeding shunt in his throat garbled the words—the shunt and his own rebel lips and tongue. Yawgmoth was mixing an opiate with his serum, Glacian was sure. Perhaps Rebbec even knew. Perhaps she thought it was for pain. Glacian could tolerate pain. He couldn’t tolerate this muzziness. “Not enough breath.”

  These goblins understood even grunts and wheezes. It was their native tongue. The vile beasts pattered among powerstone arrays and fitted ratchets to the bellows mechanisms. For a moment, the breath-machine stopped working entirely. One goblin scratched his head. The other delivered a slap to him. An argument ensued.

  All the while, Glacian’s vision narrowed to a numb cave. He couldn’t even slur out instructions now, his lungs empty. One hand weakly pounded the handle of his wheeled chair.

  The goblins argued a moment more before they heard the angry click of the man’s splitting fingernails. They redoubled their efforts. The little dunces had nearly killed him eight times—that he could remember. Still, it would be less galling to be killed by their ineptitude than by Yawgmoth’s malice….

  All went black.

  When next Glacian awoke, a woman stood in the chamber before him. It seemed at first to be Rebbec—young and strong and slender, with eyes that gleamed like crystals. Limned in light from the corridor, her face was lost in shadow. This wasn’t Rebbec. She always wore work coveralls, her lovely features powdered with dust. She would not wear these tight black leggings with snake motifs coiling around them, this embroidered vest with its inlays of ivory, this silken neck scarf, and the gleaming beads braided into her hair. It was hard to tell in the slanting light, but her skin seemed polished ebony.

  The woman spoke, her voice deep and utterly self-assured. “Ah, there you are—Glacian, genius of Halcyon.”

  Already, she had his attention. When she shooed the goblins from the room and shut the door behind her, attention became terror.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” he gabbled nonsensically.

  The woman’s eyes were sad. “I knew you were convalescing. I did not realize how convalescent you had become.”

  “Who are you?”

  Approaching the wheeled chair, the woman drew up a stool and sat. “I heard of your theory about powerstones. I heard that you proved the existence of artificial planes within each charged powerstone. I wanted to meet the mortal man brilliant enough to prove the existence of the Multiverse by demonstrating its mathematical necessity.” The woman idly sorted among the charred sketches and proofs lying on the table. “Exactly. Yes, you’ve glimpsed in mortal symbology immortal truths.”

  “Who are you?” he slurred.

  As though at last understanding, she looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I am Dyfed. I was once like you—very like you, except for this disease. I was once human and brilliant and misunderstood by all those around me. Now I am human no longer. Now I am a planeswalker.”

  The word meant nothing to Glacian.

  Dyfed went on. “Dominaria is one of millions of worlds. You’ve demonstrated the existence of artificial planes, but there are many genuine planes too. They are closed to mortals. To such as I—to planeswalkers—the Multiverse is wide open.”

  A breath from the bellows shuddered into Glacian.

  Blinking solemnly, Dyfed said, “I’d hoped to take you on a tour of the planes. I once was Thran. I’ve been waiting for the first of my people to discover these things. But the journey is perilous for even a healthy mortal. I couldn’t take you in this shape. Any other disease I could heal. You’ve seen what arcane energies do to powerstone phthisis….”

  Glacian’s eyes darkened, and his lips compressed in a grim line.

  “You don’t believe me. You think I am trying to fool you. It is understandable,” the woman said gently. “Perhaps this will convince you.” Dyfed disappeared from beside him and reappeared across the room. In her hand, she held an exotic bloom, its pink petals as vast as a man’s hand and edged in brown. She approached, laying the flower gently on his
chest. “This is a Pyrulean Orchid, a species found nowhere on Dominaria. I stepped from this world into another, plucked the flower, and stepped back.” She studied his eyes and smiled sadly. “You are still not convinced.”

  Dyfed rolled up the sleeves of her jacket. She clenched her hands together and jabbed them forward into the air. Dragging her hands apart, she tore a hole in reality.

  A vision greeted Glacian’s eyes—a world of darting angels and floating clouds. Amid continents of mist hovered impossible cities of gold. They gleamed in otherworldly splendor in the space between her hands.

  “Such places as these lie beyond the bounds of Dominaria,” Dyfed said. “Such places as these, I will show you when you are whole enough to travel.”

  For a moment, only that swimming image shone in the dark room. Then light spilled from the opening door. Dyfed startled back. The tear in reality closed again.

  In the gold light of the hall stood another figure—tall, muscular, commanding.

  “The goblins told me you had a visitor, Glacian,” said Yawgmoth ominously. “But what sort of creature is this?”

  Dyfed stiffened. There seemed almost a blush in her dark skin. “My name is Dyfed—”

  “I know,” Yawgmoth said. “I heard everything. I heard your claims.”

  Glacian gave a garbled growl. “You bastard!”

  “You listened at the door?” Dyfed asked, incredulous.

  Yawgmoth shook his head levelly. “No. We have monitoring devices here. We listen to make sure the machines function. We guard Glacian with all manner of provisions.”

  “They listen to keep me captive!” Glacian slurred unintelligibly. “Beware him!”

  “I heard all of your claims,” Yawgmoth challenged.

  “They aren’t claims,” Dyfed said. “They are the truth.”

  Yawgmoth stepped into the room and rolled his own sleeve back. The fabric came away from a long, brutal gash in his forearm, oozing blood.

  “I hadn’t time yet to see one of the healers about this—a wound from the street war. If you are who you say, heal this.”

  Dyfed stared down at the suppurating sore. An Untouchable had doubtless intended to slice open the man’s neck, this forearm received the stroke instead. At the edges, skin was flayed back to reveal muscle under a thin speckling of pus. In one spot, severed tissues showed a pink sliver of bone.

  “You’ve been prodding at this,” Dyfed said, taking the man’s arm into her hands. Her fingers were gentle and graceful around the terrible wound. “You’ve been probing to see your own bones and blood vessels. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a stack of sketches back in your laboratory.”

  Yawgmoth only blinked. “Not simply an injury, but also an opportunity to learn.”

  Dyfed’s eyes met his. “I have heard of you, as well—the man who believes the root of all illness is physical, not spiritual, that the body is a great machine that can be charted and manipulated, repaired and improved. You are right, of course.” She placed her hand directly atop the wound, and it was whole.

  Yawgmoth looked with amazement at his healed arm.

  “Don’t trust him!” Glacian hissed hopelessly.

  Yawgmoth reached down and plucked the exotic orchid from his chest. “Is this truly from another world?”

  “Yes.”

  He drew a deep breath from the flower. “I seem to remember encountering just this sort of flower on the coastal islands of Jamuraa.”

  Her hands released his healed arm. “It comes from the plane of Pyrulea.”

  “Pulling a flower from your sleeve—mere sleight of hand?”

  “What about the wound I just healed?” Dyfed asked indignantly.

  “There are twenty-some healers at the infirmary who could have done as well.” Yawgmoth took in another lungful of the flower’s fragrance. “It means only that you are a healer, not a planes—what is the word? Planeswalker?”

  “Don’t you see?” Glacian protested hopelessly. “He’s manipulating you.”

  A fiery light filled Dyfed’s eyes. “What if we were to step back into Pyrulea and pluck another?” She lunged toward Yawgmoth and snatched up his hand. The two disappeared.

  No sooner had they vanished than the door barked open. Rebbec emerged. Dust sifted down from hair and coveralls as she looked about the room.

  “The goblins said a witch woman was here. Where is she?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Yawgmoth came to confront her, they said.” She stalked among the breathing apparatuses. “Where are they? Where did she take him?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  Rebbec staggered to a halt and fixed Glacian with a desperate look. “Damn it, where did she take him?”

  “Pyrulea.”

  * * *

  —

  There was a moment as they slid between worlds—an excruciating moment. Dyfed had laid hold of the very arm she had cured. Arm and body were dragged right out of reality. The space between was a killing place, filled with ravening energies and empty frost. Yawgmoth sensed a thin envelope of protection about him, as gossamer and fragile as a film of water. Without that protection, his flesh would have been ripped from his skeleton. Even with it, the passage was agony.

  Suddenly, they were on the other side. Raving blackness gave way to omnipresent green.

  “This is Pyrulea,” Dyfed said, a smile playing about her lips. She gestured outward.

  Yawgmoth looked out from the ridge where they stood. In every direction, a vast rain forest spread. Millennial trees trailed nets of vine and moss hundreds of feet downward to wet undergrowth. Bright birds darted among broad leaves. Strange orchids spread in sunny patches on the forest floor.

  “It is a different world,” Yawgmoth breathed in wonder.

  It was not exotic flora or fauna that convinced him. It was the spread of the forest itself—literally in every direction. North, south, east, and west, the landscape curved up and away into walls. They, in turn, joined to form a ceiling of sky. This was not merely a bowl of land but the inside of an enormous sphere. Despite vast blue distances, the sky still showed the outline of trees, a living tapestry hanging overhead. The sun beamed, bright and eternal, in the center of the spherical world.

  “This is Pyrulea,” Dyfed said. “One of countless habitable worlds of the Multiverse.”

  Yawgmoth was shaking his head. “How can—how does the sun—? What keeps the plants from pulling loose of—?” He staggered, kneeling to keep from falling over.

  Dyfed seemed pleased. “The physical laws governing every plane are different. What seems odd to a Dominarian would be natural to a Pyrulean and vice versa.”

  Looking up dizzily, Yawgmoth said, “There are Pyruleans? There are intelligent creatures from this world?”

  “Yes,” Dyfed said. “Yes, of course.”

  At last, Yawgmoth slumped onto his stomach, groaning.

  “It’s all right,” Dyfed assured, setting a hand on his back. “This is a normal human response to planeswalking.”

  Clutching his stomach and curling into a ball, Yawgmoth said, “I am not…a normal human.”

  “There is no freedom for us in Yawgmoth!” shouted Gix into the cavern. It was the largest chamber in all the caves, once home to nearly ten thousand Untouchables. Five thousand remained, pressed in a tight mob beneath the ridge where the young rebel harangued. “Yes, Yawgmoth elevated some of us, but the rest he leaves to rot and die. Every day, more phthitic outcasts arrive in the quarantine cave, but for more than a year, no healthy folk have been called above. We will never be called. Yawgmoth has gleaned the grain and left the chaff to be burned!”

  The throng’s anger roared in the throat of rock where they gathered.

  “I have striven to fulfill Yawgmoth’s promises. I have conducted to the surface anyone with enough courage and hope to rise. For a
time, those folk found promise in the light, but that time was all too brief.

  “Yawgmoth does not usher us into the light but into the furnace. He burns us to fuel the engine of his ascension. I personally have heard him speak of our dead as useful tools. He piles our bodies on the steps of the Council Hall like a rat catcher seeking bounty, and he gets his reward. The Halcytes are willing to pay more to kill us than to heal us, more to bury us than to raise us from this living tomb!”

  Rage united the crowd in one voice.

  “And do we fight back? Do we dare hate the hater? No, we cower in our tombs and thank Yawgmoth for each shovelful of dirt he pitches on our heads. Well, I say, no more! No more!”

  They raised their fists with his. “No more! No more!”

  “We rise! We do not wait to be elevated. We rise, lava up the mountain’s throat. We rise!”

  * * *

  —

  Yawgmoth worked serenely at a desk beside the infirmary window.

  Outside, ragged rioters poured from every sewer grate and storm drain.

  Watching them, he placidly stirred an antiserum. The concoction leeched all metallic substances from blood and tissues, thereby accelerating the phthisis. Anyone already infected would be dramatically worsened. Anyone healthy would contract the disease in mere days. There had previously been no public use for the antiserum, but these rioters suggested an excellent one.

  “Gix will be leading them,” Yawgmoth said to himself as he watched a brutish Untouchable bash back a doorway, drag forth the man of the house, and beat him into an inert pulp. “So there will be plenty of infected individuals among them.” Yawgmoth lifted the antiserum and peered through the ruby liquid. In round distortion, he saw the brute get his head lopped off by a Halcyte guard. The poleaxes had been Yawgmoth’s suggestion. “This lovely wine will prove very useful now, indeed.”

  Yawgmoth set down the antiserum and watched the battle unfold.