The Thran

by J. Robert King

  He loved those folk best of all. Newts, he called them playfully. They seemed to him nascent salamanders, smooth skinned and placid. Nine hundred and ninety souls so far, the human inhabitants of the world. He sensed every last one of them and could enter their minds and hearts through the powerstones residing in their thigh muscles. Those stones healed the folk. Through the stones, Yawgmoth healed them, strengthened them, improved them. Their capsules infused them with enzymes and hormones. The health corps workers reshaped them through aggressive therapies and bold surgeries. They were reshaped by the loving will of their creator toward new beings.

  Daily, more patients arrived from Halcyon. Daily, more egg capsules mounded atop the nest beside the infirmary. Daily, a select few newt capsules traveled down the pipe-work of the spheres to the fourth level. In new laboratories and aisles of glistening-oil vats, their flesh would there be sampled. They would contribute what was best in their makeup toward the hope of a powerful hybrid of humanity. The elite of Yawgmoth’s healing corps oversaw these vats, priests of the new faith of phyresis.

  The first fruits of their labors were appearing above. The newts in their capsules were changing. Their skin thickened, their muscles hypertrophied, their hair grew black and barbed, their fingernails curved into near claws, their eye orbits widened and the orbs within enlarged, their jaws extended, and their teeth grew. The vestigial muscles that once turned ears toward distant sounds and closed nostrils to sloshing oceans thickened and reinitiated their ancient work. Yawgmoth had taken the human refuse of Halcyon and made them stronger, taller, abler than the finest warriors in the world above. He loved them, and they loved him. He was within each of them, and his vitality brought them to life. Daily, more arrived.

  This day, something else arrived—unwanted news.

  It was distressing to hear news, not simply to know it. He knew the mind of every resident of Phyrexia—all who bore powerstones within them—but the person who brought the news did not bear such a stone. Yawgmoth had to hear her voice filtered through the health corps worker she addressed.

  “I must speak to Yawgmoth himself,” she was saying.

  The worker stared down at her through the slit-eyed mask he wore. His own voice echoed hollowly in the armor.

  “No one speaks to Yawgmoth himself.”

  “I built these buildings! My husband designed your blasted armor!” she said through gritted teeth. She was always so beautiful, this fiery little woman. “Take me to speak to him.”

  The healer began another off-putting response, but Yawgmoth’s own voice rose through him, took hold of his throat like a fist.

  “Speak, Rebbec. I hear you. To speak to this man is to speak to me.”

  She blinked, anger giving way to suspicion, and then to fear. “Yawgmoth?”

  “It is I. Speak.”

  “Terrible news. A massive attack has landed at Orleason. The city fell in a day. The artificers within betrayed the loyal forces. Now all the city’s weapons and ships and artifact warriors are in the hands of the Thran Alliance.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A month ago, though word has only just reached us. The Orleason messenger corps was slain first, to prevent communications. The allied nations have landed and are marching inland. Even now, they lay siege to Phoenon. It is expected to fall too. If it does, six of the eight city states will be allied to the invaders. Phoenon has an army of mechanize mantis warriors.”

  Yawgmoth hated when the concerns of the over-world intruded on his paradise. Even grave matters seemed but niggling details to the god-mind he became in Phyrexia. He had allowed lieutenants—as loyal and ruthless as Gix himself—to handle most threats to his rule, but this required his immediate attention.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Rebbec asked.

  “Are the stone-chargers perfected?”

  “Stone-chargers?”

  Yawgmoth sighed, though it was the armored healer who released the breath. “The mechanisms that charge powerstones by drawing the life from the land.”

  “Oh—” Rebbec said. “No. The mana rig teams have devised implosion devices that crack stones open to suck in whatever is around them. They are ready, some hundred of them.”

  “I’m not talking of them. A single stone-charger would slay as many soldiers as a thousand implosion devices.”

  “No,” Rebbec said flatly. “The chargers aren’t ready.”

  “Then it will be an air battle—our war caravels against theirs. We’ll summon the airships of Nyoron and Seaton to meet us over Phoenon. If we can cripple the invaders’ sky forces, we can open up their ground units for bombardment. By then, the stone-chargers will be ready.”

  “They might not be,” Rebbec warned. “There are certain practical limits—”

  “They will be,” Yawgmoth said with the guard’s voice. “I’ll have to command the aerial battle personally.”

  “I want to go too,” Rebbec said stolidly.

  It was as though he had planted that thought in her head.

  “Yes, Rebbec,” he said. “You shall go too.”

  * * *

  —

  “There it is,” Yawgmoth said as the command cruiser topped a jagged line of mountains. “Douse lights!”

  The cruiser went black. Canvas airfoils rattled quietly in the dark. As the communicator sent the command back among the gunships and war caravels, they winked away as well. Only the orange glimmer of their powerstone engines showed up against the night. A much different glow lit the land ahead.

  “There it is, or, perhaps, there it was.”

  Atop the distant mountains, fires glowed. Columns of flame stood amid ruined buildings and staved walls. Minute figures in savage armor moved among the ruins. Black smoke deepened the darkness above the one-time city. Flashes of fire cast demonic gleams across rolling bellies of soot. Amid the filthy clouds above the city lingered solid forms—an armada of ships docked beside the captured Phoenon. The fact that those ships remained there, moored gunwale to gunwale, was a good sign. The Thran Alliance thought they had nothing to fear.

  Yawgmoth smiled. His own strike force—the Phyrexian armada—had been swift and thorough. Not a single Thran sentry had gotten word back of the coming attack. Soon the Thran fleet would be as ravaged as the city.

  “Phoenon,” Rebbec said beside Yawgmoth. She stared out at the fiery ruins. Once this mountain-fast metropolis had been the most ancient, second richest, and third most populous city-state in the empire. Now it was a smoldering stump. “At least there was a fight here. At least the people resisted. The city did not fall to betrayal, as Orleason did.”

  “They denied the invaders ships and soldiers, but still, they fell,” Yawgmoth muttered in wind over the cruiser’s rail. “They fell.”

  Rebbec cast her glance astern. Nine sleek gunboats trailed the cruiser. They jagged along, as quiet and strange as bats. Beyond them, the massed air armada of Halcyon, Nyoron, and Seaton flew—ram ships, war caravels, and bombers.

  “What are you going to do? Send the gunboats in for a surprise attack?”

  “We’re all going in,” Yawgmoth responded. He turned to the communications officer. “Order the captains full ahead. Tell them to lay in a course just beneath the enemy ships.”

  “Beneath?” the officer asked.

  “Beneath. We’re going to rip the belly out of the moored armada. Order the gunners to train the ray cannons directly upward.”

  The communications officer worked feverishly at a powerstone console.

  “Tell the captains to bunch around the command cruiser in tight formation. We don’t want to be stretched out in a line when ships start falling. Order the ram ships to bring up the rear and engage once the rest of us are safely past. Send the bombers out over the city and tell them to loose their implosion devices.”

  Even in the murk, Rebbec’s wide eyes and kno
tted brow were visible. “Over the city?”

  “None of our folk are left alive in there. Only invaders and traitors. Their army will be there, looting and raping and murdering.”

  “If they are raping and murdering, some of our folk still live—”

  “Perhaps they would have fought harder if they had known what I would do. Perhaps the folk of Nyoron and Seaton will fight harder knowing what I will do.”

  There was no more time for discussion. The vast black stretches of mountain had fallen away beneath the swooping craft. War caravels nudged up alongside the command cruiser. Gunboats bobbed in the interstices. Their small engines sent a candle-glow across the polished hulls of the larger ships. Ray cannons stood upright above-decks, poised to crack open the hulls of Thran vessels. Ram ships brought up the rear of the contingent, and bombers peeled away into the darkness, soaring toward the smoking city.

  The moored fleet of the Thran Alliance hovered just ahead, just above them. It was massive. Twenty cruisers, fifty war caravels, and perhaps a hundred smaller craft. Despite their numbers, they all boasted old-fashioned bombards. These craft were designed to unleash a leisurely and leveling rain on a city from miles above, or lie side-on other ships at close range. Since most were also sea-going vessels, their hulls were solid wood and held neither guns nor watchmen. Smooth, blind, and undefended. The ships clustered there like fat grapes hanging from a lofty arbor.

  “Ripe for the plucking,” Yawgmoth said. One hand clutched the rail as the other lifted to prepare the fire signal. The communications officer prepared the same message.

  A final rill of mountain slipped away beneath the dark fleet. Their engine lights splashed momentarily across the peak as they passed. Then the vessels slipped into the valley beyond. The city was a vast and ragged scab at the center of that valley. The last ram ships cleared the lip of the valley and gave a final thrust of speed. Faint as dusk-light, the engine cast a glow across the ridge.

  An alarm bell clanged ahead. Lanterns winked awake along the rail of the nearest Thran ship. Cries went up, audible even on the torrid wind.

  It little mattered. Before a single invader could raise a weapon, Yawgmoth’s Phyrexian armada shrieked beneath the flotilla.

  He dropped his hand, signaling and ordering, “Fire at will!”

  Ray cannons ignited. Triangular wedges of gold and green leaked from the casements and splashed across the darkened deck. Columns of pure energy vaulted up. Ram-rod straight, the blasts rose to crash audibly against the hulls. Eight-inch-thick wood incinerated in an eye blink. Twenty-foot-long voids were raked open in the ship’s hulls. Things rained out—hewn and smoldering things and hewn and smoldering bodies. Where the bolts weren’t spent, they vaulted through the bilge and hold and cabins into engine rooms. Slaughter.

  Rebbec crouched at the rail, watching in terror as the Phyrexian armada vaulted beneath the Thran fleet. Debris hailed down from shattered hulls and battered the decks of Phyrexian ships. Chunks of red-hot metal skittered over planks. Burning wood cascaded. To starboard, a hunk of hull crashed atop a Phyrexian gunboat. The vessel flared once as its engine went critical. It fell like a comet from the sky. To port, grain sacks tumbled from a ruined supply boat. They struck a Phyrexian caravel passing beneath and exploded in choking clouds of flour.

  Something heavy and wet thumped the deck just behind Rebbec, a man—or half of one. He was gone above the waist, his bowel cauterized in place. The remains slid and tumbled across the rushing deck, as though the legs hoped to run away.

  How could the Phyrexian armada survive this killing hail?

  Rebbec cringed, turning her gaze fore. Just ahead, a great Thran behemoth listed massively and horribly.

  “Split the armada! Evade!” Yawgmoth ordered. The command cruiser slid from beneath the Thran caravel just as it jolted down ten feet. Crew spilled from the tilted deck.

  “They’re losing lift!” Rebbec shouted, looking back over the bow.

  Huge and shuddering, the ship plunged among the rushing tide of Phyrexian ships. Two gunboats impacted it and disintegrated. A third caromed from its wheeling hull. A Phyrexian caravel cracked into the Thran gunwale and clove a trough down to its chine boards. Another of Yawgmoth’s ships would have struck it head-on, except that the bow gunner flipped his cannon down and blasted a passage through.

  Mantled in shattered masts and tangled spars, the Thran ship keeled over and plummeted toward the darkness beyond the city. Crew, equipment, and provisions tumbled out of it like pepper from a spinning mill. The ship struck ground in the midst of encamped Thran armies. The powerstone core split and went critical. Its explosion was unheard amid the firestorm of ray cannons, but the glare of it lit up the vast floating belly of the Thran armada.

  “Ripe for the picking!” Yawgmoth shrieked in exultation.

  Another Thran caravel plunged. It dropped suddenly, as if the cord that held it aloft had been sliced. It tore through a swarm of Phyrexian ships, dragging three small gunboats with it. A fourth clipped the rigging, spun wildly, and impacted another Thran ship, ripping it in half. Sparking and hissing, the severed sections tipped away from each other and roared away.

  Three more craft went down in the next seconds. Twenty more in the next minutes. Phyrexian ships dodged most of them and tore the guts out of more. Yawgmoth carved an avenue of destruction beneath the invader’s fleet. The sky was falling. Thran ships dropped atop Thran troops. Rock blasted out in a slaying rain. Soldiers tumbled into riven craters. The chasm cut through the sky above was cut below through flesh and rocky earth.

  Rebbec clung to the rail. “Why did I think I had to come?”

  The worst sight of all came from the ruined city. While falling ships destroyed the army they had been meant to protect, implosion bombs ripped apart the remains of Phoenon. Each bomber left long trails of pulverized rock and bone and flesh. Everywhere within the walls, white blasts crisscrossed. Roofs and walls tumbled into the sucking voids where the powerstones cracked. Orange fires belched up from whatever was left to burn. Red flames leapt from the shoulders of those caught in the blaze. They stumbled and flailed until clothes and skin and muscle were burned away and only dead bone remained to tumble to the ground.

  “The cannons are nearly depleted,” reported the gunnery ensign.

  “Increase speed!” Yawgmoth shouted.

  The Phyrexian armada roared faster. Three caravels, one heavy cruiser, and a score of small gunboats had gone down with stricken Thran ships.

  “Fire to depletion!” Yawgmoth ordered. “Summon the bombers! Best speed to Halcyon.”

  The cruiser gave a shuddering groan as the final charges of light spasmed from the cannons. One by one, they issued gusts of gray smoke. The cannon cores went dark. Only the roaring wind remained.

  Yawgmoth’s cruiser soared out from beneath the Thran armada. His fleet followed. Phyrexian bombers, running light and hollow, met them at the top of the sky. The ships turned, arcing away over the encircling mountains. Once beyond the gray wall of it, lights winked back into being along the rails and masts of the craft.

  Yawgmoth counted them, and his face was grave. “We will need every ship. We will need every gun.”

  “What now? Will they pursue?” Rebbec asked.

  “No. Their losses are too great, their army too vulnerable. They will fear we have troops waiting in the mountains to swarm down on them. They will not pursue.”

  Rebbec shook her head. “If only we did have troops in the mountains…”

  “This battle was only to make things equal. It was only to winnow their fleet and army and assure Nyoron and Seaton they must remain loyal or pay in blood for forgiveness.”

  “They will march next on Halcyon,” Rebbec said.

  “They won’t reach Halcyon. Not the city itself. We will meet them at the Megheddon Defile, just east of the city. They must pass down that valley of death to emerge on
to the desert plains. The ground troops will be bottlenecked emerging there. The air units will be committed to their defense. We will fling them out of the sky. Meanwhile, our main army will slay them in their hundreds as they emerge. That will be the greatest battle of this war. That battle will live in the mind of the world forever. The Battle of Megheddon Defile.”

  Rebbec was in the quarantine cave when the battle of Megheddon Defile began. For weeks, she had watched Yawgmoth’s preparations. She had seen slanting bunkers quarried from the desert floor. She had watched Halcyte and Phyrexian guards training for the coming battle. She had seen the hordes of clockwork killers buried in the sand or hidden rank on rank in flanking regiments. Horrible destruction was coming, and she had not wanted to see it.

  Even down here, though, she heard it. A vast boom resounded through the deep cave.

  “He’s using my behemoths.” Glacian’s voice, long unintelligible to anyone but his wife, was now almost too garbled even for Rebbec.

  The man’s phthisis had eased since Yawgmoth removed the powerstone sliver, but his mind had only worsened. The rupture deepened between the two halves of his psyche. His memory failed. Paranoia rose. Confusion and desperation tore him apart. He refused the powerstone therapy that had healed the rest of the city. He refused even to enter Phyrexia, there to be tended. Instead, Glacian spent his hours alone in the dark quarantine cave, accompanied only by his powerstone contraptions, a string of faithful goblins and, of course, his wife. Though she visited him every day, he often accused her of staying away weeks at a time. Today, it was a blessing that Glacian’s paranoia had a different target than Rebbec.