The Thran

by J. Robert King

  Yes, but where there is hatred, there is also love. They are halves of a whole. Every love contains a thread of hate, and every hate a thread of love.

  She had no love for him. Not now. Not ever.

  Yawgmoth was astonished. He had been certain of her love.

  It no longer mattered. He possessed her utterly. He knew her every secret. Nothing was hidden from him now. He was in her every tissue, every thought. She no longer even had a mind without him. What need did he have for love?

  Phyrexia did not know me when I first touched her, but she has come to love me. Rebbec will be the same.

  Perhaps a day had passed before word of the Thran attack came. They had slain all the steeplejacks. They had slaughtered the army guarding the road. They were scaling the walls en masse. They were climbing into the city. They were fighting in the streets.

  Yawgmoth had his answer. His foes had refused the ultimatum. Their hatred was strong. There was not even a little love in it.

  He thought of the nine bombs, tall and gleaming. Yawgmoth slowly withdrew himself from the enfolding heart of Phyrexia. He slowly withdrew himself from Rebbec too. He would leave her here. There was no will left in her. Even if she wanted to escape, she couldn’t. The heart of Phyrexia would keep her here, forever.

  With that thought, Yawgmoth appeared in the midst of his nine stone-chargers. Already the artificers were busily loading them into a sled to bear them up into the city.

  “Soon the Thran will taste my anger.”

  Yawgmoth and a corps of Phyrexian guards reached Halcyon’s fifth aerial port just before the stone-chargers did. It was lucky.

  The port was overrun with Thran. Wrath and Vengeance—Yawgmoth’s last two personal caravels—were captured. A crew of minotaurs swarmed the decks. Some carried dead crew to lay decorously on the dock. Others gathered and inspecting the weapons of the fallen. A few charged the ships’ ray cannons. They were getting ready to cast off, to use these ships against the city that created them.

  “I should have told Gix to defend this spot first,” Yawgmoth hissed. Gix was off commanding the defense of the upper city. Yawgmoth bitterly drew his sword. He turned to one of his Phyrexian guard—a woman with filed teeth and wide eyes. “Tell the bomb crews to wait on the stair, out of sight with the doors bolted, until the ships are secure.”

  As she departed, Yawgmoth stormed onto the floating dock. Ten Phyrexians followed. They charged the minotaur who carefully tended the dead.

  One could not surprise a minotaur; bull men were cannily alert. Deadly horns, fiery eyes, snorting nostrils, and a chest as broad as a wagon bed, the minotaur rose to his feet before the onslaught. He drew steel in both hands, his nails as ebony as his hooves.

  Yawgmoth leapt to the attack, tangling his weapon with the minotaur’s. The powerstone in Yawgmoth’s sword flared with each echoing blow. It should have sliced right through the bull’s blades except that the beast also bore powerstone swords. He had evidently liberated them from the fallen guards.

  Yawgmoth could not surprise the minotaur, but he could impugn the beast’s honor. “Ah, looting the bodies?”

  The red fire in the minotaur’s eyes turned to blue. “I am guarding them, preparing them for burial.”

  Yawgmoth charged in while the minotaur explained, shoving the beast off balance and onto one foot, dangerously near the edge of the dock.

  “Stripping them of weapons isn’t preparing them for burial. Warriors should be buried with their weapons.”

  The bull man had just regained his footing and fought forward when that verbal blow came, and it had been a blow. Yawgmoth had worked among these creatures. He knew their strict codes of conduct. Warriors—even enemy warriors—were to be buried with their weapons.

  “These swords came from stores below decks,” the minotaur managed, landing a skidding attack on a shoulder plate.

  Yawgmoth lurched beneath the blade, twisted, and pulled free. “Next you’ll be going through their pockets. Next you’ll be stripping their clothes.”

  The blue flames became white. The minotaur roared and lunged.

  He had over-committed. Yawgmoth stepped back, letting the creature crash past. He swung his blade, sinking it into the creature’s side.

  Even gushing blood, the beast whirled and lashed out.

  Yawgmoth received the attacks as though the minotaur merely handed him items he had requested.

  “What are you going to do next, rut with the dead, you filthy beast?”

  There was no roar this time, so intense was the minotaur’s hatred. He barged, bloody, into Yawgmoth and flung him to his back beside the dead. In three-fingered hands, swords whirled. Powerstone blades sank into flesh. It was all Yawgmoth could do to knock back the blows. He was losing. He had enraged the beast, but not enough to get the better of him. Until—

  “You care nothing for these warriors….Guarding them? Preparing them for honorable burial? Minotaurs know nothing of…honor.”

  The beast hurled the powerstone blade down to cleave Yawgmoth’s head. At the last moment, Yawgmoth rolled aside, and the sword cleft the head of one of the deadmen. It sliced through the skull and into the pier beneath.

  The sword was stuck, gripped not by wood but by the stupid incredulity of the beast. He had desecrated the honored dead, the very ones he had been given to guard.

  Next moment, he joined them. Yawgmoth’s sword pierced the minotaur’s belly and carved upward through gut and rib and lung to slice open his ripe, red heart.

  Even as the massive warrior crashed down beside the human dead, Yawgmoth rose. He was mantled in blood, his own and the blood of the bull. Only his powerstone sword shone cleanly. A whoop went up behind him. Yawgmoth turned, seeing his Phyrexian guard had made similar work of the other minotaurs aboard Vengeance. Some of the warriors were busy pitching dead bodies over the rail. Others cut loose a trophy for their belts or a snack for their mouths. Their captain was the one who had whooped.

  She shouted, “Vengeance is secure.”

  “Wrath is secure,” came another shout.

  “The dock is secure.”

  Yawgmoth ordered the captain, “Tell the crews to bring up the bombs. Send a messenger to find Commander Gix and order him to drive the refugees from the temple.”

  The captain acknowledged the orders and rushed off on Yawgmoth’s bidding.

  Meanwhile, Lord Yawgmoth strode up the gangplank of Vengeance, dripping gore. It was a very old image of death—bodies and blood. Soon he would redefine the image of death, he and his nine stone-chargers. They would make death a thing of pure white, without even bones to sully the desert. He would scour it of the mistakes of the past. In white fire, he would annihilate the whole Thran army.

  * * *

  —

  He was gone. Oh, the bliss of it. The monster was gone. He had torn through every fiber of her, raked every nerve, threshed every thought.

  No, not every thought. He had stolen every thought but one. If he had known that one thing, he would have possessed her utterly, and no one wants to be possessed utterly.

  She had once loved him. That was the secret. She hid it in plain sight, masking it in the name hate.

  Now it was hate. Love was gone. Now and forevermore, it was hate.

  A moment before, she could not have thought such a thing about Yawgmoth. In this secret place, though, Rebbec could think clearly. Her will remained. From that secret place flowed rage, which filled the raw void he had left in her. It stung like bitter spirits, but it also warmed her. She halted the advance of that angry tide. There was one thing that remained to be done before she let it fill her completely.

  I must do it, while there is still enough of his smell in me. I must do it now, while the world still thinks I am he.

  Rebbec summoned Phyrexia. She reached out for the world. She expanded her being outward and felt it tentative
ly take hold of her. It knew she was not Yawgmoth, but it sensed its master in her being, in her blood, and it responded tentatively.

  Rebbec did not flow out on the tides of the world as Yawgmoth did. Her essence did not convert itself to the blood of Phyrexia. Still, she could feel the pulse of the land and sense what it sensed. She searched through it, her mind determined and yet frightened.

  Phyrexia knew she searched and wondered what she searched for.

  I seek my love, was what she thought.

  The world was mollified. It told her Yawgmoth had ascended.

  Rebbec did not cease seeking, a sad and grieving child.

  The world allowed her her grief. It allowed her to search.

  Then she found him—not Yawgmoth, but Glacian.

  He was in the same raised laboratory as Dyfed. He had just arrived. The four red-robed vat priests were busy arraying him on an adjacent pallet. His white casket lay nearby, the life-support mechanisms gingerly positioned around him. Priests moved his withered limbs with reverence and buzzed excitedly. One of them was very slowly, very carefully, drawing a line from the middle fingertip of his right hand, up the arm and onto the shoulder….Except he wasn’t drawing the line, he was incising it. Beads of ruby blood welled up slowly from the cut mark.

  Terror, like a drug, moved through Rebbec. The vision faded. She sensed uncertainty in Phyrexia. The world withdrew from the touch of her mind. Her terror repelled it, a foreign thing—Yawgmoth never felt terror.

  He wanted to do it himself, Rebbec projected into the cloud of doubt that hissed around her. He will be furious when he discovers what they have done.

  There was a pause in that great mind. Yawgmoth did not feel terror, but Yawgmoth’s servants felt it. Deep terror was the soul of Yawgmoth’s greatest servants. This one, this Rebbec, must be his greatest servant. Who else would he invite into the inner sanctum? Who else would smell so pervasively of him?

  What shall we do?

  The mist that had separated Rebbec from the world was thinning. She had to be careful now. Any more suspicion might break the tenuous tie. What does the master do to those who disobey?

  He kills them.

  Then let it be done as he would do it, Rebbec responded.

  The thought was no sooner formed than Rebbec felt the four dark souls wink from existence. She could see them, Yawgmoth’s four greatest eugenicists slump down one by one. They did not clutch their hearts but their thighs, hands over the Phyrexian heart stones implanted there. She felt not only their dying souls but the wet rupture of organs within them. Muscles spasmed, cut by the jag ends of broken bones. Their own musculature became great gizzards, grinding bones and innards into a digestible paste.

  They weren’t the only ones dying. Dyfed, too, began at last to die. The deaths of her attendants meant her own death. Rebbec was relieved to feel it happening.

  The world mind grew distressed.

  Yawgmoth was finished with her, Rebbec lied. He had learned all he could from her. He sought the planeswalking organ. The vat priests had scrambled it when they scrambled her brain. Incompetence. It is why he brought Glacian here. His planeswalking organ…she stopped, glimpsing the truth in the mind of Phyrexia. Glacian was a nascent planeswalker. It was why Dyfed had come to visit him. It was why Yawgmoth had kept him alive so long and brought him here to dissect. Struggling to maintain the easy tone of her thoughts, Rebbec continued….is still intact. That is why Yawgmoth wanted to cut him open…himself.

  There was belief and understanding in the great mind.

  He too will die, if left untended.

  Through Rebbec’s mind flashed images of the myriad vat priests working the catwalks nearby. Some of them lifted their heads, as though hearing a silent thought.

  No, Yawgmoth wished to do it himself.

  He is not here. He is in Halcyon.

  I will take Glacian to him. Move me to the laboratory. I will pack Glacian in his healing capsule. You will take us to the portal, and I will take him to our master.

  There was suspicion again in that vast mind.

  Rebbec let her once-love for Yawgmoth roll out in a lying flood.

  Immediately, the darkness of the inner sanctum sifted away.

  Rebbec stood in a nine-sided laboratory of polished steel. Her lacerated husband lay on the shelf on one side; Dyfed died quietly on the other. Four vat priests were dead heaps on the floor.

  Rebbec knelt by her husband and stanched the blood flow from his wound. She lifted him. He was only a bag of bones. Cradling him, she took him to the healing capsule. All the while she worked, arranging life-support mechanisms, she felt the mind of Phyrexia press upon her, watching uneasily. The moment the casket was closed, Rebbec and Glacian dissolved away.

  They reappeared on the first sphere, the fungus city spreading to one side and the great black portal to the other. Not waiting for the world to change its mind, Rebbec hefted the end of the white casket and dragged it, hissing, across the grassy ground. She watched the blue sky as she went, waiting for a bolt to leap down out of it and slay her and Glacian at last.

  The foot of the coffin grated on stone. She looked about. She stood within a dark cave, beside the mirror podium and steel-and-glass book. Phyrexia was only a blinding and horrible vision through the portal.

  The Caves of the Damned were the most wonderful sight Rebbec had ever seen.

  “Now to scare up a few goblins to help me hoist this thing to the city.” Heaving the capsule, Rebbec dragged it away from the gateway.

  Yes, she would take Glacian above, but not to Yawgmoth. She would take her husband to the temple they had designed. Once within, they could fly away from all this madness.

  * * *

  —

  It was a beautiful thing to fly this way. There were no Thran ships in the sky. The Phyrexian fleet was minuscule, but nine caravels was enough. Yawgmoth led them from his own warcraft, Vengeance.

  He did not even command Vengeance. Not in words. Not in orders. The crew knew what he wanted. Pinpoint accuracy was not critical with stone-chargers. He gave no orders. They would have soured the taste of wine in his mouth. They would have pulled his attention away from the spectacle unfolding below.

  The Thran and their allies filled the desert on all sides. Their forces stretched away to the mountains in the west and the hills in the east. It seemed the whole world had risen in outrage against this single city, poised in the heavens, within reach of the gods. Of course they would, these violent beasts, half-cows, half-cats, half-lizards—stunted dwarves and wilting elves and thick-browed men. The Phyrexians had risen above them all. They had climbed the chain of being and were ready to ascend that last step.

  Let the rest descend, Yawgmoth thought, staring down at the moiling multitudes. Let them all descend.

  The first bomb, silver in the sunlight, tumbled free of Vengeance. It toppled end over end. The flashes from its fins swept over the army of dwarves below. They looked up from their crude assault engines, paused beside their laboring donkeys, and gaped at the sparkling doom that fell on them. The bomb righted itself, point downward. Its fins gave it a spiraling descent. Soon, it was but a silver spot against the staring army. Then it was nothing at all, only its shrieking whistle reaching Vengeance and her lord.

  A white smile spread across his face.

  As if in answer, a white circle formed below. It spread outward with the speed of a dilating eye, a uniform disk of force. The dwarves silently disappeared in that cloud. In moments, it had flashed to the base of the extrusion and out to the mountains on the far side. Its center swelled upward in a tremendous bulge. From the middle rose a fat column of force. Tracers of burning things shot into the air beside the superhot column. Killing clouds rose in rings around the spot.

  “Beautiful,” Yawgmoth said, sipping his wine.

  Only then did the sound of the explosion reach Ve
ngeance. The craft jolted, seized in a giant hand of noise. It was omnipresent. It was too loud to hear. It swept past, enveloping all the world in thunder.

  A second bomb rolled from the ship, over an army of humans doing their best to flee from the first blast. There would be plenty of fleeing today but no escape. The humans died as suddenly and spectacularly as the dwarves.

  There were seven more bombs left.

  “One for each city-state, and one for Yawgmoth,” he quoted. He sipped his wine and watched his foes dissolve in a pure, scouring whiteness.

  Through the sensory conduits of his command seat aboard the Null Sphere, an old artificer watched his people die.

  A moment before, hundreds of thousands of Thran and their allies had filled the desert below. Now only their ghosts remained—a wide ring of white cloud. The Null Sphere drew their ghosts upward and channeled the power into Phyrexia. Yawgmoth not only slew the Thran. He feasted on them.

  There was a way to stop him, though. The old man and his artificer colleagues would have to sacrifice their lives, but at least Yawgmoth would be stopped.

  “Take us higher,” the old man said breathlessly. He turned his head toward the Phyrexian that controlled the Null Sphere’s altitude.

  The beast glowered at his powerstone console. “Any higher, and you humans will die of asphyxia.”

  “This low…we cannot draw mana…from the whole cloud,” the old man lied. “The city…will be engulfed.”