Magic the gathering time.., p.9
Magic the Gathering: Time Streams (Artifacts Cycle Book 3), page 9
"You never cease to amaze me, Karn," the mage master said incredulously, "a machine that sees ghosts all around."
"Don't you remember the lost students, the lost friends?" Karn asked.
Barrin took a long breath. "Oh, yes, I remember them, and I will be sad to be back where they perished. But I have mourned. It has been ten years. There are new flowers rising among your ghosts."
"I still ache over my friends," Karn replied. "It is as raw as on that first day."
"Perhaps it is something to do with flesh. Mourning is healing. You cannot heal. You cannot truly mourn. You can only ache forever," Barrin thought aloud. He sounded pensive. "We'll have to devise some means to keep you from aching forever."
At last Karn turned toward the man. Beyond Barrin he saw the golden ship, manned by a whole new contingent of students and scholars. Gold-painted rails glimmered in the sea-shine, and white sails reached eagerly toward the isle. At the helm stood Malzra himself, at once ancient and young. The ship's name even told the tale-New Tolaria-and for the last eight years, it had been laboratory and tutorial hall and dormitory to all of them, vessel for all of Malzra's pursuits.
It was the genius of humans to discard the old and embrace the new, but flesh was malleable. Silver was not.
"How can I forget this ache and still be me?"
* * * * * Jhoira stood at the edge of her world. Behind her lay Tolaria, desolated by the blast of Master Malzra's time machine. Before her lay the illimitable sea. She was caught between. Her secret trysting spot had become her home. It was a small place, but dry and clean, appointed with furniture, books, and implements scavenged from the academy.
Most of the old school lay in ruins. The walls that remained were leaning hazards. The walls that had fallen were cairns for the dead. Many of the living had been buried in them too.
Jhoira herself had had to dig for three days to escape the secret passage where she had been when the inferno began. She spent the next three days digging up the final few others who were trapped alive. She and eight others-all young students, resilient, canny, and agile-withdrew from the death-smelling place to Jhoira's secret niche. They, of course, made forays back into the ruins, to bury the dead and salvage equipment and food stores. These trips were far from safe. On the first such excursion, the group lost four of its members who wandered into extreme time rifts and were torn apart. Jhoira and the remaining four learned to avoid such rankling crevasses of time.
Some zones were dark and dry, their flora withered away. These were fast-time areas, where a week might pass in a day. Such places received perhaps a day's worth of sunlight and rainwater in a week and so became chill deserts. The darker and drier the zone, the faster the time in it and the more extreme the rent between it and the temporal flow of the rest of the island. Other zones were bright and wetsteamy swamps. These were slow-time areas, where a day took perhaps a week to pass. In such areas, the sun was intensely bright, moving visibly across the sky, and rain came in constant, short, drenching downpours. Most slow-time areas had not had time to adjust to their new climactic conditions, flooded to their edges and filled with drowned trees. In others, time moved so slowly, the fires of the original blast still stood in orange curtains.
Extraordinary time shifts proved impassable to Jhoira and her companions. Crossing such verges boiled blood and shredded skin, caused some limbs to die of deprivation and turn gangrenous and others to burst as interstitial tissues swelled. Such were the fates of the first four who died. The survivors were careful to map and avoid the violent time rifts. They ventured with trepidation into more moderate time fissures and found them difficult to enter and leave. Changes in inertia caused walking into a slow-time area to feel like wading forward into hardening cement. Emerging from slow time to fast time often resulted in extreme dizziness and sometimes loss of consciousness.
Even so, the final survivor of the school came from an extreme fast-time peak, which fused inexplicably with a slow-time slough beside it. From the normalized zone stepped an old man named Darrob. He had been only a child of twelve at the time of the blast but, five years later, he emerged a gray-haired madman.
There was only one true benefit Jhoira and her companions discovered from these time shifts-slow-water. Water resisted temporal change, retaining the speed of its former milieu awhile before gradually absorbing a new pace. Water that flowed from a certain extremely slow-time zone had preserving qualities, slowing and even stopping the aging of anyone who drank the thick stuff. Jhoira had no real idea how it worked, but she knew it did, at least for the short term. It was by drinking slow-time water that she had stayed young-seeming only twenty-two.
Despite this rejuvenating drink, death stalked the survivors of Tolaria. In the sixth year, their numbers were dwindled from six to five. Out hunting snakes, a fifteenyear-old boy fell down the sea cliff, broke his neck, and was dragged out to sea, even as the others swam helplessly after him. Two years later, a pair of eighteen-year-old lovers carried out a suicide pact, leaving only Jhoira, old Darrob, and another young woman. This last withered soon after, wasted by some interior disease. Her ashes nourished the rose bushes she had so patiently planted and pruned and nurtured. In the two years since her death, the roses had gone wild, spreading across the nearby boulders in a savage, fragrant blanket.
Old Darrob was dead now, too. Three months back, he had succumbed to the rattle in his chest. Jhoira had buried him beside the slab of sandstone where Darrob had loved to lie, a great silver lizard soaking up sunlight. His years in the dim depths of fast-time had taught him to love the sun. He had been Jhoira's last companion and, though mad himself, her final hold on reality. Since the day of his death, Jhoira had felt her own soul going wild, like the thorny rose.
She was alone now, yes, but she always had been. The nine who had lived with her had been companions, not friends, not confidantes. The only true friend she had ever had was Karn, and he was not even human. Jhoira often wondered what was wrong with her. Perhaps she had been taken from her people too young. Among Ghitu, a girl was not a woman until she had gone on a vision quest. Jhoira had never gone. She was twenty-eight chronologically and twenty-two by all appearance, but her soul was still the foolish and frightened soul of a child. That child had made one desperate lunge toward adulthood, had opened her secret heart to one man, believing love could not be fooled. It could be. It always would be. The man had proven a monster. Now, forevermore, Jhoira would be alone. It was a miserable way to live, but it was at least that-a way.
The island had become hers. At some point in the forty mad seasons since the blast, her fierce desire to escape the forsaken land had become a fierce desire to protect it from invaders. At first she referred to this new mania as Malzra's Malaise-a fear of invaders, destroyers. Now she was beyond such light and self-conscious wordplay. She was the island's protector, its guardian spirit. She was the ghost woman on the western shore, forever watching for nearby ships, forever fashioning arrows as Kerrick had taught her, forever designing and building whatever mechanisms she could for the defense of the land.
And now, with unmistakable intent, a white-bellied sailing ship sliced through the spitting billows, making straight for the eastern ports of the island. Jhoira had not forgotten her dream of glimpsing her soul mate on a ship such as that one, but such were the fantasies of a child. Love could and would and forever must be fooled.
Jhoira watched the ship a moment more before withdrawing into the niche, fetching up her bow and quiver of arrows and heading out to intercept the landing party. With the whole of the island between her and the docks, and over a hundred time rifts slicing through the center, Jhoira would not beat them to the shore. It didn't matter. The island's natural defenses were formidable enough.
* * * * * Barrin inhaled the salty scent of the eastern bay, remembering the smell of saw grass and palm. He sensed nothing of death or decay in the air and was glad. Perhaps time did heal all wounds. Perhaps Tolaria had forgiven-or at least forgotten-its despoiler.
Barrin glanced back toward Urza, who helmed the golden galley New Tolaria. It had become his floating workshop, mobile and elusive, beyond the reach of any petty government. From the moment the refitted and renamed ship had slid out of dry dock, Urza had been its unquestioned master. Captain Malzra, the students called him, and he proved a deft helmsman. Somewhere in his three and a half millennia, the man had learned to sail. Better still, Urza's knack for teaching seamanship equaled his talent for teaching artifice. He did not so much instruct but demonstrate and inspire. The young scholars needed only watch the master hoist the main or scale the ratlines before they all wanted to do it as well and as quickly as he.
Of course, being a functional immortal with a body of pure energy can make even the oldest planeswalker a marvel in feats of strength, agility, and speed.
As New Tolaria rounded the stone jetty at the mouth of the bay, Urza manned the helm, and his young crew worked their posts with a quiet ease that allowed them long looks at the land ahead. Barrin, too, studied his erstwhile home.
The eastern docks remained largely intact, though the pilings were desiccated from neglect, and thorny weeds had volunteered in the rotting planks. Two ships of the former Tolarian complement lay half submerged dockside, their upper portions scored with burn marks, and their lower portions so covered in barnacles they seemed made of stone instead of waterlogged wood. As each wave rolled, long and even, across them, they rocked indolently in the basins they had hollowed for themselves.
On the opposite edge of the bay, a sinister slough of dark water lay, its surface churning as though it boiled, A time rift, Barrin realized. Urza had described such phenomena after returning from one of his planeswalking scouting excursions. He had spoken in depth about the physics of the rents but could answer none of the important questions, such as-what happens to mortal flesh that ventures into or out of one? Urza's only response to such queries was, "We'll have to find out when mortal flesh encounters one." Barrin had made sure the students were taught how to recognize temporal anomalies and warned what dangers might surround them. He had even devised illusory models and magical simulations to prepare the explorers, but all he could offer was supposition. The experiments with mortal flesh were yet to come.
Urza steered clear of the time rift and the other hazards in the bay and brought New Tolaria smoothly into the deep-water inlet. He shouted orders, and one by one the last few sails were taken in. Released by the wind, the ship lounged aft and piled up glassy mounds of water before it. It slowed to a near stop, Urza leaned on the rudder, and students eagerly crowded the starboard rail, each wanting to be the first to leap to the dock and tie off the ship. Two young women were the first with the strength and daring to jump, and three young men followed shortly after. Their laughing comrades hurled to them thick coils of line, which they swiftly hitched onto the pilings. The great vessel lulled once to the fore with the last of its lazy motion and then settled in on its moorings.
More students leapt to the dock and received the gangplank hoisted down to them. It no sooner boomed into place than the five ensigns and their five exploratory parties were trooping in orderly fashion onto the dock. The ensigns were the oldest students-in their mid-twenties-left from the school at Tolaria, and their parties were picked from late-teens who had volunteered knowing the dangers they would face. These groups debarked with the easy strides of conquerors. The white robes of the former academy had been replaced by rugged canvas cloaks and capes, with leather leggings, knee-high putties, and iron-edged shoes. In moments, the explorers filed off the dock and gathered in clusters, receiving orders. Then, to north, south, west, and the angles in between, they set out.
Barrin watch it all, apprehension knotting the muscles in his neck. If it was Urza's island and he felt so safe on it, why were mere children being sent out to explore it? The touch of Urza's hand on his back made the knots redouble.
"We are home again, Barrin," Urza said, deep satisfaction in his voice.
"We are at the door, knocking," Barrin replied. "We aren't inside yet."
Urza studied his longtime associate and friend. "After all your lectures about owning up to my mistakes, returning to right the wrongs I have done, how can you criticize me today?"
"They're only children, Urza-" Barrin began.
"They are grownups. They have been thoroughly trained. They know what to expect. They know what they risk," Urza replied evenly.
"They're only children. Not grownups, not probes, not machines," Barrin finished.
"If anything should go awry, I am linked to them and can reach them at a moment's notice." Urza paused, seeming to hear a voice speak to him out of the wheeling blue sky. "In fact, the first party of explorers is summoning us. They have discovered a time rift." He reached out and grabbed Barrin's hand, saying simply, "We go."
Barrin felt the world fold in around him and Urza. They were planeswalking.
After complications had arisen with Urza's trick of turning planeswalking mortals to stone (four of them had been cracked en route and hemorrhaged massively when returned to flesh), he had devised better spells for keeping mortal flesh alive through a planeswalk. The enchantment currently in effect reduced Barrin from a three-dimensional construct to a two-dimensional one. In this compacted form, he was protected against the trials of sudden vacuum, volcanic heat, and absolute cold encountered in a planeswalk. Barrin's lungs could not explode because they were no more than flat sheaves of paper. Urza hung there beside him, attached and pulling him through to where the world opened up again.
When it opened, the two scholars stood suddenly on a bald brow of sand. Before them, the land dipped away into a grassy swale. There three students stood, staring in astonishment toward a sharp-edged ravine. The air in the ravine looked dusky and turgid, tiny flecks of dust catching and scattering the rays of the sun. Beyond the deep furrow stood an old-growth forest, but within it, the ground held only short, scrubby plants with tender purple blossoms. Small white rocks lined the base of the valley. At the lip of the ravine crouched the team ensign, a powerfully built blonde woman. Beside her hovered a young man with long black hair. They spoke to each other in hushed tones and gestured into the yawning rift, which emitted a sound like a breathing giant.
"Let's see what they have found," Urza suggested.
He released Barrin's hand and started down the hillside. With each step, puffs of dust rose from his feet, making him seem to walk inches above the ground.
That's the way he would prefer it, Barrin mused to himself as he followed. The two scholars passed the group of whispering students, who startled back, lost the thread of their conversation, and receded into watchful silence. Urza and Barrin continued until they stood behind the crouching ensign and her comrade.
"You summoned me?" Urza said by way of introduction.
The ensign stood and snapped to attention, "Yes, Captain."
"What have you found, Ensign Dreva?"
"A time rift, Captain, just as Master Barrin had indicated in his reports." Dreva's eyes were a bit wider than normal, and she stared into space. "A fast-time rift, I would suggest, judging from the apparent darkness and the lack of water. We have conducted a few experiments. I can repeat them. Rehad?"
She reached out to the young man next to her, gesturing for something, and received a long, leafy branch he had gathered in a nearby forest. Despite her formal demeanor, the affection between ensign and student was obvious in the lingering way the branch was passed, hand to hand.
Ensign Dreva turned her attention back to the captain. "Watch the foliage on the end of this bough."
She raised the branch and swung it slowly into the air above the ravine. Something invisible seemed to take hold of the dangling end, making it jitter and sway, and the ensign dug her feet in and tightened her grip on the bow to keep it from being yanked out of her hand. The leaves quickly grew brown and curled into dry crescents. Next moment, they rushed downward from the branch to the floor of the ravine, where they lulled before turning to dust. Meanwhile, the leafless twigs twisted, their bark peeled away, their wood cracked and grayed, and the entire branch came to resembled the hoary claw of a forest hag. The ensign withdrew the stick and laid it beside two others, similarly transformed.
Urza's smile, small and unaccustomed, showed his delight at these findings. "Excellent work. Using a living branch to probe the rift was an insightful innovation."
The ensign flushed. "Thank you, Captain Malzra."
"There are some who doubted whether you would be equal to the task-" Urza turned his mysterious smile toward Barrin "-but I was confident."
"Thank you again, Captain," Dreva replied. "I suggest we continue probing the edges of this time rift and set warning markers. Though most likely the blast that created the geographic ravine also created the temporal anomaly, we shouldn't assume the boundary of the one will be the exact boundary of the other."
"Well reasoned, Ensign," Urza said. "Continue. Report in if you discover anything else of note." He turned, shouldering Barrin toward the privacy of a nearby hilltop as the ensign sent Rehad and the other students to the forest eaves to gather more branches. "It seems to me they are doing quite well, these children you speak of."
Barrin stared down at the tangled grass at his feet. "The dangers here are your doing and my doing, not theirs."
"If they will live here with us, build here and study here, they must inherit all the evils of the past," Urza replied. "It is the responsibility of every new generation to understand what has come before, if only to decide what to keep and what to discard."
The philosophical debate was interrupted by a warning shout from the verge of the forest. Barrin and Urza turned. Ensign Dreva stood at the edge of the wood, grasping something in one arm and urgently summoning her comrades with the other. The students flung down the branches they had chopped loose and ran. Urza and Barrin ran too.
Dreva pulled savagely on a tree limb. Other students, two young men and a woman, reached her and added their muscle to the task. Moments of shouted orders and positionjockeying gave way to groans as the students hauled hard on the limb.
