The Colors of Magic Anthology (magic: the gathering)

by Richard Lee Byers

  "They are really killing each other, aren't they?" enthused one codger between sips of red wine.

  "Yes, " Captain Crucias answered flatly. "Six months ago, you would have seen them killing only forests. Now you get to see them killing each other. "

  Madame Gheiri's face had flushed healthily once the anchor was down and the war was unfolding before them. "You say they fight at night, too? They will be fighting all through supper and on into the evening?"

  Crucias' face was grim. "Anymore, yes. They'll fight certainly through supper, and probably until they can see only by the light of the bombs they drop on each other. "

  "Splendid. " She was at last pleased with some aspect of the journey. "It will be glorious to watch the fires and flares under a starry sky. Perhaps my niece Elgia will at last feel well enough to come on deck. There must be plenty of eligible bachelors on that battlefield. "

  The codger giggled in delight. "I can hardly imagine there will be any left after this evening's show. " He took another sip, and his lips were limned in red as he said, "I suppose if they run out of men, there'll just be more arriving on ships. "

  "Look at that dragon engine, " Crucias said, wanting to divert his own attention from the massacre.

  A massive mechanism waded into combat. Its steely tail scythed through charging lines of mortal flesh. Men counterattacked, spears jagging into the air. The artifact dragon spread wings of titanium mesh and drew them inward. Spears and men both tumbled in twin cyclones.

  Ornithopters darted like dragonflies and dropped bombs among the toiling armies. Smoke and dust and body parts bounded up in violent clouds from the explosion. Moments later, the popping reports reached Nunieve. These blasts were dwarfed, though, by a huge explosion in the center of the battlefield.

  "Ah, did you see that?" asked Crucias. "That pillar of black smoke rising now into the sky?" His speech was interrupted by a thunderous boom, the combined ignition of hundreds of bombs. The soundwave echoed out over the glassy sea and riffled the sails of Nunieve. "One of Mishra's titans has stumbled into a trap. I'm told that Urza's army digs gigantic pits, large enough to swallow a dragon engine whole, and then they line the bottom with bombs and cover it. When the time is right they lure a machine onto the spot. That must be what you just witnessed. It fell and ignited the bombs and-ah, see, there,… it's climbing out!"

  Something emerged from the base of the rising smoke cloud. The gigantic mechanism did not so much climb as crawl. Misshapen and trembling, the titan clawed onto the blasted plain. Its legs were gone below the knees, and riven sinews of wire and plate dragged across the torn ground. It heaved itself along, above Mishra's shrieking, retreating forces. The sound of its shearing gears reached Nunieve. With a terrific groan, the titan collapsed atop its own mired men.

  An excited cheer went up from the noble passengers, and more than a few raised appreciative wine glasses to toast the machine's demise. A ravening boom caught the cheer and swept it away amid dying screams.

  "Well, Captain," said Madame Gheiri, "despite a week of tortures at sea-everything short of sea monsters and scurvy-you have certainly delivered the promised entertainment of this voyage."

  "Enough mayhem for you?"

  "Enough, for the moment. The clamor of it all has even elevated the bouquet of this rather vulgar wine you serve. Bathed in the glow of bombs and the sound of falling titans, the supper fare might even seem palatable!" She laughed lightly.

  Another column of smoke had gone up since she began speaking, this one in the woods behind the battle lines. After rising through curtains of moss and continents of leaf, the soot was broadly spread. Wind drew ash and a putrid scent across the gunwale.

  "They're burning the dead from yesterday's battle," Crucias noted.

  "I do hope the wind shifts," said Madame Gheiri distastefully. "I'm getting bits of ash in my wine-"

  She was looking down into her glass, picking at an offending particle, when the blast went off.

  First came only a searing light, a bright yellow-white that split the center of the battlefield. It seemed to Crucias that the island actually jumped. The land looked unreal, only a vivid painting on canvas, and even now the canvas tore in half and admitted the blazing sunlight. That's what it seemed-that there was a second sun hidden behind the isle, a blue sun, and it was burning through the fabric of reality. A vast ring of dirt and bodies and machines leaped up around the blinding blaze. The blast carved a deep well in the center of the island, pulverized rock and man and machine-flinging them up in a brown bowl all around it. The next moment, the bowl doubled in size, then quadrupled. Forests that had withstood even the onslaught of Urza and Mishra stood no longer, laid down like blazing jackstraws. Mounds that had lain round and solemn against the bright sky disintegrated in the face of the swelling sphere of force.

  '''Mayhem," Crucias gasped out.

  The whole island disappeared. It was gone, down to a mile below the waterline. Titans, dragon engines, ornithopters, warriors-all gone. The ocean would have poured into the void except that even now, the advancing wall of the sphere pushed it back. The merfolk observers darted off trying to stay ahead of the crushing mass. Water piled into a great mountain that ringed the flash. Already, Nunieve's bow strained upward on the swell. The child-shaped figurehead stared into the bright flash of the end of the world.

  "Weigh anchor!" Crucias shouted.

  He took a step toward the capstan but got no farther.

  The deck pitched-stealing his feet from under him. Nobles and crew tumbled amid bolted settees. Blood-red wine hung in weird arcs in the air as the ocean sucked its belly away beneath the passengers. Then they were rising. Wine spattered groaning planks. Nunieve crawled up the wave. Foaming water scraped the very clouds.

  Roaring, Crucias clung to the leeward rail. Through black water, he glimpsed the ocean bed, horrifically close as the ship heeled away from the slope. He was sure Nunieve would capsize and kill them all, but the welling flood yanked the anchor chain tight and brought the hull upright again. With a visceral jolt, the anchor pulled free of the ocean bottom. Nunieve mounted up the wave. Nobles tumbled from the port side. Crucias could only watch, heart in throat. They would all be dead soon enough.

  There was mayhem and death enough for everybody.

  The ship bobbed corklike up the wave. Through the wall of water, the blast glared. It had grown only more intense. It gleamed brilliantly through half a mile of turgid brine. In moments, Nunieve reached the foamy peak, a region where wind and water and fire were mixed. Crucias couldn't tell up from down, light from dark.

  They were over the crest, in winds that tore the masts down as they had the trees, in the bowl of the blast. Sea-water rushed to fill the crater where Argoth had been. Nunieve sailed pell-mell down the concave slope. It followed the bright interior of the new sun awakened on Dominaria.

  That was the last any of them saw. The eyes of every person on deck burned from their skulls. Blindly, they clutched to the mad ship as it coursed down the wave, toward the roaring foundations of the world.

  "Sit, Daddy. Aren't you thirsty?" Pretty and small at nine years old, Nunieve sat on the twilight verandah. A Jamuraan tea service rested on a platter before her. Steam rose brightly from the dark brew. "It's getting cold." Nunieve wore her best dress, what she called her tree dress because she got to wear it only when they were on shore, where the trees grew. At sea, she was garbed in a waistcoat and pantaloons, like any good captain's son.

  The captain himself stood before her. No longer a privateer, Crucias had become a respected freighter captain. As fair, hard-working, and reliable as the sun itself, Crucias was among the richest sea captains on the continent, and he had only Nunieve to thank. Just now, Crucias did not heed his daughter, though. He looked past brickwork and riling grape vines, down to the sea, wide and black beneath the setting sun. Crucias blinked toward it, mesmerized. He had just come off of it and could hardly wait to get back. To him the sea was life, and the land was death-


  "I can't wait forever, " Nunieve insisted.

  Crucias smiled, shaking his head. "I'm sorry, Darling. I'm just distracted tonight. "

  She poured tea into a cup for him, and then one for herself. "If you're worried about tomorrow, I'm not. You said the chirurgeon was the best on three continents. He'll know what to do. "

  "Yes, Darling, " he agreed, kneeling and taking her hand. It was small and fragile in his palm, like the body of a sparrow. "Yes, he will know what is wrong. "

  She nodded sagely, lifted a cup to her lips, and took one scalding sip. The porcelain swooped away, and a troubled tremor began in her chin. He thought he saw a tear form, but it never emerged, and she swallowed the tea. A look of relief crossed her face. She smiled. "It tastes delicious from these new cups. "

  "You don't have to drink it yet if it is too hot, " Crucias said, taking his own experimental taste. He grimaced.

  "Or if it is too bitter." He set the teacup down on the tray.

  Nunieve still held hers in dainty fingers. "No. This is the first time I've had a tea set, and the first time we've been on shore in a year, and I want to enjoy it all." She took another sip.

  "You're a good, brave girl, Nunieve," Crucias said. "A good, brave girl."

  Crucias awoke to a sea storm. The deck rolled in long, deep swells. Shudders ran through the planks. With each sway of the ship, shattered masts scraped along the gunwales. Metal shrieked. Wood moaned. Severed lines lashed the deck. Rain battered the captain's back.

  "Blast."

  Whether it was day or dark, he could not have told. The flash that had destroyed Argoth had destroyed his eyes, as well. He didn't need eyes, though, to know that most of his passengers and crew were dead. The cupric smell of blood filled the air, and a septic scent told of spilled guts and corpses. Aside from his own groans, Crucias heard no other human sound.

  But he lived-if this could be called living. Blind, battered, sick aboard his own ship, Crucias lived. He could not man the pumps alone even if they remained intact, could not clear the deck, could not even see land or star to find safe harbor. Perhaps there was no land to see. Argoth was gone, its ravaged foundations somewhere in the sloshing depths below. The armies of Urza and Mishra were gone, too. Perhaps the blast had sunk Teresiare itself. Perhaps there was no safe harbor in the world anymore.

  A wooden bucket bounded noisily across the deck toward Crucias. Blindly he lifted a hand over his head. He could only guess its course. There was a stunning sound, and the taste of blood, and he slumped again.

  He had placed too much hope in the chirurgeon, the best on three continents. The man knew about the application of leeches, the uses of phrenology, the manipulation of pressure points on the foot and ear to relieve tensions in distal portions of the body, but the wasting illness that ravaged Nunieve was not localized anywhere, on ear or foot or body. It was the doom laid on beautiful things by whatever dark and jealous god equated mortality with misery. Her illness was not a thing of body but of soul, a curse laid on her because she would otherwise have been perfect.

  The chirurgeon had had no answers for them beyond herbal balms and the insinuation of copper fibers under the skin. Crucias had followed his advice assiduously, and Nunieve had borne the painful brunt of these "treatments" with the same courage she had borne the scalding tea. She was a brave girl, not only by nature but by necessity. She saw acutely that her father needed her to be brave.

  They lingered there, in that vine-strewn villa above the sea, so Nunieve could wear her tree dress and wander the bazaar. Her eyes gleamed with the bright flap of trader's tents, and her neck and fingers shimmered with the jewelry Crucias bought her. The money he spent was legitimate coin, and the adornments he bought reminded of the bounty of the sea-pearl and mother-of-pearl, nautilus shell and abalone, shark tooth and starfish. At first Nunieve gladly received these gifts and wore them everywhere. Slowly, though, she ceased to enjoy them. The shiny things only drew more notice to the taut lines of her throat and the thinness of her wrists.

  One day, she refused his purchases. Instead, she turned about to find something of equal value in an adjacent stall-something for him. "Buy these, Daddy. You have been wanting a new set of knives for your carving projects," she said.

  Shadowed by the slate roof of the smithy, Crucias smiled. "They are too expensive, Darling."

  "No more expensive than the pearls you wanted to buy me," she replied. Nunieve laid hold of his hand and said gently. "You don't need to buy me all these things. I know that you love me."

  "Good girl, Nunieve," he said through a choked throat. "Always know that I love you."

  Crucias awakened, weeping into the teeth of the storm. The bucket lingered beside him and delivered a fresh blow with each roll of the ship. He flung it angrily away.

  There never had been safe harbor for him, not when his daughter turned to a skeleton before him. Not when his nation ceased to exist. Not now. Had he been on land during that blast, he would surely have died, but this couldn't be called living.

  The vessel heaved sluggishly beneath him as it lolled up one edge of a wave. Its bilge must have been filling. Between rain and sloshing waves, it could only be filling.

  Then rain hardened into biting hail.

  Growling, Crucias crawled across the battered planks. He groped for handholds. Ripped sailcloth… knotted lines… splintered spars… a cold, cold arm-

  In the midst of pelting hail, he paused. His fingers held an arm in a sleeve of lace. He tried to speak but found his throat was fit only for screams and roars. Hoping against hope, he followed the lacy sleeve to a shoulder rill and past it to a collar. He pressed his fingers into the fallen woman's neck but felt only flesh as cold and still as meat in a cellar. There was no pulse.

  The roaring hail grew voracious across his back.

  He took a moment more to pass his hand over the woman's face. Madame Gheiri.

  "Mayhem and death," he hissed. "Mayhem and death."

  Miserable, Crucias crawled onward. Hail sliced into the back of his neck and the crown of his head. He clawed along the stumps of the shattered rail to 'midships and clambered over ironwork settees. There were three more bodies between him and the ruined hatch. He did not stop among them but only swung down into the hold, away from the lacerating skies.

  Twilight had already surrendered to night before they returned from their last visit with the chirurgeon. Nunieve wanted more tea. Crucias was in a mood to refuse her nothing. Soon she sat in the same seat with the same Jamuraan tea set and the same tree dress as she had worn their first night on land. Once again Crucias stood, staring past grape vines and out to sea. Aside from the deep darkness nothing else had changed.

  No, everything had changed.

  "Daddy, don't be so sad," she said. "We'll be back at sea tomorrow."

  "Yes, Darling," he said distantly. "We'll find another chirurgeon. A better one."

  "We'll be back at sea tomorrow, so let's enjoy our tea tonight. This is my last night on land," she said gently, pouring herself some tea.

  Crucias hurried to her. "Don't say that. We'll stay longer. We can stay here as long as you want."

  "Oh, it's all right, Father." She was sipping the too-hot tea and struggling not to make a face. When she regained her composure she looked up at Crucias. "Don't be sad."

  "But I am sad, Darling."

  "Then don't be afraid."

  "I am afraid. You are everything to me. My whole world."

  "I'm not afraid, Daddy. Don't you be afraid."

  He bent to embrace her. She melted into his arms and snuggled against his neck. There was a final, perfect moment as he held her. Then her last long breath left in a sweet susurration.

  He breathed, too, a startled, trembling breath, as though he could draw her fleeing spirit into his body before it fled away forever.

  Crucias stood. The Jamuraan tea set toppled and crashed to the ground.

  She did not stir at the sound.

  He lingered there, holding her, gazi
ng out at the black, unseeable sea.

  This ship had been his courage. He had not gone to sea again until he could take Nunieve with him. Now the ship was dead, and he nearly so. It was a ghost ship, ravaged first by economic necessities, then by jaded ill-use, and last of all by a blast that destroyed the very world. The same dark, inexplicable forces that had clawed from the blind earth to destroy his daughter had reached up from the black sea to destroy the ship that bore her name.

  "I failed her twice," Crucias whispered bitterly to himself. "I lost her twice." He felt a stab of guilt for taking his daughter to sea, for turning her namesake into a barge for hauling human bloodlust and depravity. "I destroyed them both." There could be no more damning fate than that.

  He was done. He had died in every way a man could die except in flesh. It could come in many ways now. Perhaps the ship would sink or capsize. Perhaps the storm would kill him with ice and tumbling debris and exposure. But all of those would only be doing the work Crucias should do himself.

  "I destroyed her. I can destroy myself."

  With a groan, he dragged himself up from the staved crate where he lay. He had no idea how long he had lingered there, lapsing into and out of consciousness. The ceaseless turmoil of wind and sea and the dizzy pitch and shudder of the ship had made sleep and dream indistinguishable. Trembling, he eased himself to the planks and crawled. A smashed barrel spilled pasty flour across the boards. A wet line snaked through the mess, and jags of shattered glass littered the floor. Uncaring, Crucias wormed his way toward the hold door. The staterooms and his own cabin lay beyond. There would be a very sharp knife in his desk drawer, one of the blades he had used to carve the figurehead. It would carve his neck shortly. But he did not think of that. He thought of her. In his mind's eye he could still see the lines of that sculpture, the face of his beloved child.

  "She would not have wanted me to do this," he told himself as he reached the door out of the hold and hauled on the bar that held it closed. "She would not have wanted me to do any of this."