The Thran

by J. Robert King

  What about the swords? Xod found himself asking.

  Give them to citizens. Let them fight. Let them help you drive the damned back into their sewers. Now go, Xod. Kill any who remain and pursue the rest below.

  Nodding numbly, Xod gathered the three swords. He strode out of the empty granary. The street beyond thronged with Untouchables, tearing down fences, bashing in doors, dragging daggers over the throats of citizens, looting and burning. Xod waded into their midst, slaying savagely, without remorse.

  You should not have let those children go, Xod.

  I know, Yawgmoth, I know.

  * * *

  —

  Yawgmoth pulled his fingers away from a large gray crystal in the schematic of the lower city. His eyes remained closed. The mental contact persisted for a moment even after the physical connection was broken.

  “The granaries are secure. I have a good man down there. I had had five good men…word is out now that Untouchables have been disguising themselves in Halcyte armor. That trick will work no longer.”

  He opened his eyes and noted the expressions on all the faces there. Rebbec watched the crystal map table intently. Eldest Jameth looked green gilled. She had not spoken a word for hours. The elders had varying expressions—amazement, admiration, concern, doubt, hope. Even a few of Glacian’s goblin friends had entered the room. They watched like delighted children.

  In rapid succession, Yawgmoth laid his fingers on various other powerstones. “The Temple remains secure….The Council Hall is regained….Crews are scouring the amphitheater and arena. There are only a scant hundred rioters in them, and soon there will be none at all. The eighth terrace will be secure once they are slain….”

  Rebbec glanced up from the stones. She shivered, as if chilled by his easy tone. The elders about her nudged each other in quiet congratulation. Their homes and places of work would soon be safe.

  “I would estimate a thousand Halcyte deaths and four thousand rebels. They are on the run now. They know they cannot win or even survive. Their leader will always choose to survive….”

  His fingertips clutched the gray powerstone linked to the granary. A smile crept across his features.

  “Ah, Gix. Even now he flees back home, down the channel we have been unable to discover. He flees wearing a helmet linked to me.”

  Hands flying now across the array, Yawgmoth closed his eyes. The smile deepened.

  “What are you doing?” asked Eldest Jameth.

  Yawgmoth did not pause to answer. His hands moved in violent bursts across the matrix. When at last the task was done, he leaned wearily back from the table and blinked his eyes open.

  “I sent a message to each of my soldiers in the Lower Ward. They all have an exact visual image of the route of Gix’s retreat. I commanded the Halcyte guard to pursue the rebels down into the caves.”

  “For what purpose?” Rebbec blurted.

  “For what purpose?” Yawgmoth asked.

  “They are already prisoners down there. Unless you plan a mass execution—”

  Yawgmoth hauled the crystal table up. It swooped past their noses, swiveled, and stood in the cabinet. It seemed no more now than a panel of wood. Yawgmoth placidly closed the doors before it.

  “The war is won, the demonstration concluded.”

  “You can’t just kill them,” Rebbec protested. “There are many citizens in the quarantine cave.”

  “The quarantine cave will not be entered,” Yawgmoth pledged. “Those orders were clearly given. We are not attacking invalids. We are exacting punishment on rebel murderers. They have slain a thousand citizens today. Shall we leave them down there to rise again and slay another thousand? And again? And again?”

  “The sooner the threat to the city is ended,” Eldest Jameth said quietly, “the better.”

  Yawgmoth dismissively brushed his hands. “What happens down there is the decision of the Halcyte guard and their captains. I meanwhile have a more important—and more pleasant—task to perform.” He reached into one of the pockets of his armor and drew forth a pendant with a glowing blue stone in it. He opened the chain outward and solemnly drew the amulet around his neck. “This is a gift from a friend—an amulet that allows me to call on her in grievous times.”

  Rebbec blinked, “Call on…her?”

  In answer, Yawgmoth clasped the stone between his hands. A woman suddenly appeared in their midst. Thin and muscular, the black-garbed woman had short-shorn hair and ebony skin. Her eyes were piercing, and her smile a little mocking.

  The elders leapt slightly back at her sudden arrival.

  Rebbec stood her ground, eyes narrowing. “Dyfed.”

  “In the flesh,” the woman responded with a gentle bow.

  Eldest Jameth stared suspiciously at her. “Who are you? A wizard?”

  Yawgmoth laughed. “No, she’s grander by far than a wizard. Dyfed is a new breed of human—a rare and wonderful breed. She is the living manifestation of human destiny. Though she was born human, she is now as different from us as we are from animals.”

  “I didn’t know I was to be put on display,” Dyfed said.

  “She is a planeswalker,” Yawgmoth concluded.

  “A planeswalker? What is a planeswalker?”

  “It will be easier to show you,” Yawgmoth said. “I have asked her to conduct us on a tour of some of the planes, to give us an idea of what she is and what we might become. She has agreed. She will take us to walk the planes.”

  Dyfed swung her arm out, sweeping the company. Her fingertips trailed a palpable magic, as though her arm were a sorcerous wing. Pinions of energy brushed their heads and bodies and clothes, enveloping them in a gossamer veil. The laboratory faded from view, as flat as an old memory.

  A crazy geometry ruled the blankness around them. Circles curved outward instead of inward. Pentagons had square corners. Every line bled itself into every other possible line. It was a chaos of potentiality, in which all things simultaneously did and did not exist.

  The Corridors of Time, Dyfed said into their minds. The Blind Eternities. The Bastard Plane. Whatever name you would call it, this is the nonsense in which all planes float. Everything that is derives from this place of things that are not.

  There came no response to her words. The mortals couldn’t move. As rigid as statues, they hung there alongside each other, just as they had stood in the laboratory. Yawgmoth, Eldest Jameth, elders, Rebbec, and even the goblins—none moved. Only their eyes held life, the spark of intelligence.

  Suddenly, they were in an utterly different space. It was a sere world of orange rock and windswept sand. In the distance stood fingers of stone too tall and narrow to stand on Dominaria. The sky was red, and through its pale veil, stars winked even at midday. The group stood on that world, their feet imprinting the dust, but the magic pinions of Dyfed still enfolded them.

  I will not release you entirely here. You could not breathe, and you would freeze, and your eyes would be drawn from their sockets. If not for these things, you would enjoy this place. Here you could leap thrice your height. I brought you here only to convince you it was nowhere on Dominaria. And now for a more habitable realm.

  Again into the Blind Eternities they spun. Again the solid world flattened and folded and inverted itself. This journey seemed more brief, more tolerable. They emerged into another world.

  They stood on a drifting cloud in an illimitable sky of purple. There was no land below, no sunny emptiness above, only this all-enveloping purple and the stacks on stacks of cloud. A fine mist about their knees condensed to solid ground beneath their feet. The final tracers of Dyfed’s magic released them, and they could move, breathe, slump down in weak-kneed awe on the slowly transforming cloud.

  Rebbec strode gently forward. Her feet made a wet sound on the cloud. It clutched enviously at her. A few paces led her to a cloudy cliff. She walke
d with ease over the knob of stone and stood there, perpendicular to the rest of the group.

  “In a plane that is only cloud and sky, it is better if one cannot fall,” Dyfed said gladly. She swept her hand out again. The gesture enveloped the company in silken bands of power.

  Rebbec seemed to be lying on her side as they jagged through the Halls of Time. When the company emerged again, she was in fact on her side.

  There would have been no better place to be on the lofty meadow. Those who were not lying down or at least kneeling collapsed. As high as the clouds had seemed, this sunny overlook was ten times as terrifying. Below the cliff’s edge, wide rivers formed slender threads on a wide plain. Ancient forests seemed but clinging lichens. The endless ocean at the edge of it all visibly curved.

  Only Dyfed remained standing, and beside her, Yawgmoth, because he leaned on her. His voice was giddy in that soaring place.

  “This is our destiny. It begins today. I have asked Dyfed to find me a paradise, a perfect plane, and make a permanent portal to it from Halcyon. The Caves of the Damned will become a doorway to our paradise. The first who will dwell therein are our own infirm. Folk made ill by powerstone phthisis will move into a virgin world, safe from ravaging magic. They will be cured. Once they are, they will open the world to the rest of us for colonization.

  “Yes, elders. I promised to end the riots and have done so. I promised to eradicate the phthisis, and I am doing so. I promised to elevate our race into divinity, to bring us to a perfect world in which even death will hold no sway. This day is a first step toward that glorious new world.”

  * * *

  —

  The only Untouchables who survived in the Caves of the Damned were those in the quarantine cavern, those with phthisis. It was among them that the soldiers found Gix.

  Ravaged by disease and war, Gix lay in a dark alcove and panted like a dog with storm terrors. He still wore powerstone armor and helmet. In one hand, Gix clutched a sword, with which he had slain eighteen guards. The mood for killing was gone from him, though. He did not lift the sword when health corps workers surrounded him. He did not cling to the hilt when they snatched the sword away. It was lucky for him that he didn’t. The workers were ordered to slay anyone who resisted. Had Gix resisted, he would not have survived to see Yawgmoth.

  Of course, surviving was what Gix did best.

  Yawgmoth stood above him now. The tip of his sword hovered just above Gix’s throat. There would be no escape this time.

  “Why don’t you get it over with?” Gix asked, trying to sound brave.

  “Get what over with?” Yawgmoth replied.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and kill me?”

  Yawgmoth sighed impatiently. “Whether or not you realize it, Gix, you are my puppet. You have been my puppet for years. I knew you would rise to lead your people. Your idealism runs deep but not as deep as your fear of death. It makes you utterly predictable. Honesty, discipline, charisma, fear—these are your marionette strings. I have been pleased to pull them, but I have no more need of a puppet.”

  “Then why don’t you go ahead and kill me?” Gix shouted.

  “A puppet, no, but a servant, yes. Like all of us, Gix, you must ascend to survive. You must climb out of your former skin—it is too small for you now. Take command of your strings. Vow your loyalty to me and live.”

  “If I am only a puppet,” Gix growled, “then why don’t you just make me vow?”

  Yawgmoth’s eyes were as sharp as his sword. “That is what I am doing.” He stared a moment more and then snorted. “This is tiresome.” Yawgmoth raised his sword for the killing blow.

  “Wait! I will swear it! I will serve you. Loyally. Forever.”

  * * *

  —

  Yawgmoth strode through the Caves of the Damned among the dead. Health corps workers tended them with wheelbarrows and meat hooks. They no doubt considered this a mass grave. Yawgmoth would change their opinion.

  He walked to a particular tunnel—long and smooth in the bedrock. Dyfed had said such a site would be needed, surrounded in solid basalt. He walked through the tunnel, running his hands affectionately along the black stone. At its end lay a small chamber, what once had been the private residence of a lord among the damned. Here, just across this threshold, she would make a portal to paradise.

  Where others saw a mass grave, Yawgmoth saw the future.

  Thran-Phyrexian War Day Three:

  Battle of Megheddon Defile

  Megheddon Defile had become a meat grinder. Dwarves, minotaurs, Thran, Phyrexians, Halcytes—they fought among the dead.

  When the third day of battle dawned, the Thran and their barbarian allies were entrenched behind walls of bodies. They could not retreat into the defile. Halcyte airships commanded the skies over it. Neither could they break through. Halcyte monsters and machines commanded the desert. The Thran allies could only hunker down in the middle ground and fire what missiles remained to them.

  Meanwhile, Phyrexian catapults made missiles out of dead Thran. Putrid meat rained sporadically from the skies.

  Dwarven Commander Curtisworthy shielded his red beard from the latest hail of gobbets.

  “Monsters!” he hissed as the hunks pattered his mailed back.

  He had seen Phyrexians up close now and knew them to be monsters. Yawgmoth had changed them. Horns, sagittal crests, spiked brows, saucer eyes, snake fangs, distended jaws, bifurcated tongues, barbed shoulders, scimitar claws, carapace and scale, stinger and tail, slashing, bashing, eviscerating—they were monsters. There was nothing of fear or regret in them. There was only killing.

  So, the Thran allies crouched behind corpse revetments. Even dwarves, even minotaurs, even true-hearted warriors hunkered there. This was not war. This was slaughter.

  “Trapped, with death all around,” growled Curtisworthy. Were it not for the tourniquet that bound the stump of his sword arm, he would have led a suicide charge, hoping to break through. Not now. “Trapped.”

  Curtisworthy peered over the wall of dead, gazing through a cloud of flies.

  Only the alliance’s clockwork warriors held the front. Morning sunlight shone across metallic arms. Axes rose and fell. Lances streamed gore. Artifact creatures chewed monstrous flesh. Only Glacian’s metal warriors were a match for the implacable Phyrexians.

  Mantis warriors dragged flex-steel abdomens ceaselessly and tirelessly among the dead, seeking foes to slay. With lithe claws, they gripped Phyrexian heads. With masticating mandibles they bit away Phyrexian arms. With six legs, they tore the monsters apart.

  Silver lancers ambled over ground too treacherous for cavalry charges. They moved with the leggy motion of spiders, but the speed of horses. Their lances pierced even powerstone armor. One by one, Halcyte guards fell.

  Glacian’s greatest triumph were his shredders—ten-foot-tall metal globes fashioned of blades. Gyroscopes whirled in inner circles of steel, providing momentum and mincing meat as they went. In the center of each globe floated a powerstone that directed the motion of the ball. It mowed down anyone it caught.

  “Machines and monsters,” Commander Curtisworthy growled.

  Perhaps the allies could not press forward, but neither would they retreat. Yawgmoth would exhaust his defenses…and be caught unaware by Thran reserves.

  “We will prevail. With our artifact army, we will prevail.”

  * * *

  —

  “I won’t do it,” the chief artificer protested. The young, blonde-haired woman sat within the command core of the Null Sphere. She occupied one of the powerstone-studded command chairs. “You’re asking me to kill my own people, by the tens of thousands! By the hundreds of thousands!”

  Yawgmoth glared down at the woman in the slim metal chair. He lifted a booted foot to rest on the sinewy conduits that linked the chair to every distal point upon the Sphere.

&
nbsp; “I am asking you to surrender to me the Thran artifact army.” His sword whispered from its sheath and slid gently against her neck. “As I see it, you have no choice.”

  The chief artificer did not look up. Instead, her eyes were trained on her comrades, seven more artificers, strapped to similar seats. They controlled the sphere—where it drew its power, where it channeled its power, what machines it monitored, what machines it compelled.

  “Oh, I have a choice, Yawgmoth. We all have choices. We can refuse, and die, and save hundreds of thousands of others.”

  Yawgmoth simply shrugged. The motion was enough. His powerstone armor accentuated the movement, propelling his sword along the chief artificer’s neck.

  Steel sliced through skin, through muscle, through windpipe. In the sudden spray, sparks leapt from myriad conduits. Rank smoke rolled whitely around the chair. Within its glimmering arms, the woman convulsed. She was gone—the sword had nearly taken her head off, but the surges of power through the chair jiggled her dead figure.

  With a sigh of mild dismay, Yawgmoth withdrew his sword. It dripped across the grid-work floor of the control core. He strode calmly across the metal mesh, approaching the next chair. There a young artificer sat, shivering. To have attained such a post at his age, this man must have been a prodigy. It was good. Prodigies are bright but malleable.

  Yawgmoth casually wiped the shimmering blade on the man’s shoulder. It was an act meant to scare him. It worked too well.

  No blood came, but another liquid—lower down—filled the chair and electrified it. The prodigy convulsed and slowly died.

  Shaking his head, Yawgmoth strolled onward. Smoke rolled up behind him. The prodigy cried out fitfully in agony.

  There were six more seats, six more artificers, each strapped in place and guarded by Yawgmoth’s Phyrexians. Even if all of them died, Yawgmoth could still take command of the Null Sphere. He knew Glacian’s mind, and in knowing it, knew all about this station. Even so, it would be more convenient to delegate the duties. He wished to be personally engaged elsewhere.