She smiled brightly. “If I have to die-and all of us have to-I am glad I die beside you.”

  With a ululating cry, the monsters rushed in upon the pair. A forest of fangs and claws and stingers converged. Karn shielded Jhoira with his silver bulk.

  There was only shrieking and blood and limbs flung outward to thrash the trees. Amid talons and teeth came blue flares of magic. Some coalesced into dagger swarms that buzzed like bees through the melee. Others spattered eyes and woke in them cannibal rage. Still others melted tooth and bone into chalky pools. Growls and gurgling. Blood and burning. Death and dismemberment. In moments, the furious carnage spent itself. The forest grew still again.

  Karn turned, confused. Jhoira emerged from the haven of his arms. There was someone else beside them suddenly, a blue-robed man with gray-brown hair. He brushed his hands together as though he had just closed a rather dusty door and then withdrew his fingers into sleeves designed for spell battle.

  “Ah, here you are,” Barrin said matter-of-factly. “The main battle is going well. When I heard the explosion here, I thought it must have been the work of you two.”

  Jhoira breathlessly surveyed the killing grounds. The forest reeked like an abattoir. “The fiends. You killed them. You cast a spell.”

  “A series of sorceries,” Barrin replied. “Some of my best summonations and enchantments. They were well spent, though, and I can get them back. That’s what libraries are for. I couldn’t have gotten you two back.”

  “Gotten us b-back …” Jhoira repeated absently.

  “Urza needs you in Shiv,” Barrin said.

  The master had been gone for a few months, and in the escalating Phyrexian war, Jhoira and Karn hadn’t had much time to wonder about the success of the mission for Thran metal.

  “I summoned him to aid with the battle-one of the reasons it is going well. Anyway, he says he’s struck a deal with the Viashino, He needs you to be a liaison with them. He needs you and Teferi and a number of other students and scholars to help run things with the lizard men. I will stay behind with most of the academy. We will carry on this war until you return.”

  “And me?” Karn asked. “Does he need me?”

  “Yes,” Barrin said, his expression darkening. “Yes, Karn, he needs you perhaps most of all.”

  *

  “No, the gray lever, not the red one,” shouted Jhoira down the line of steaming pipe-work. Remembering herself, she repeated the instruction in Viashino.

  Her dialect of the language was, of course, Ghitu and therefore somewhat difficult for the lizard men to understand. Even so, after half a year of working daily with lizard men, Jhoira was the only human who could speak Viashino at all. Urza couldn’t exactly be called human. Just now, the creatures she spoke to cast quizzical looks up the foggy line of pipes.

  “Gray, you know-the color of your blood. Red is the color of mine.” Jhoira was almost frustrated enough to bite her own hand to demonstrate what she meant.

  One of the younger lizards, a Diago Deerv, gestured emphatically at the appropriate lever. The scaly imbecile to his left grabbed the red lever anyway. Diago dealt a slap of his webbed hand-a bit of correction used by many members of Viashino society-reached over, himself, and drew the right lever.

  A blast of steam came from the pipe stack behind Jhoira, venting into the black heights of the cavernous room. The stench of sulfur and superheated rock permeated the place. It boiled across the unseen vault, jiggling loose the condensation clinging there.

  Hot drops pelted across her sweating back. Jhoira drew up a cloak of drake feathers, standard issue for workers in the lava pits. The feathers were proof against even the hottest temperatures, and yet they wicked sweat and heat away from the skin. Beneath the cloak, she wore only a loose, light shift of linen and similarly loose pantaloons. Her feet were shod with drake-feather slippers, and she had matching gloves in case she needed to handle any of the red-hot controls.

  The vitreous pipes began to glow as lava came pumping up them. The heat of the chamber redoubled. In a few minutes, it would be a veritable oven.

  “Let’s get up to the blast furnaces,” Jhoira instructed.

  The scales of the lizard men prickled from faces, arms, and tails, struggling to bleed heat into the air. Wide-eyed and panting, the Viashino nodded their eagerness. It was one gesture they had picked up from their human colleagues.

  “Good. Follow me.”

  Climbing over a jumble of dark tubes, unused and cracked from centuries of neglect, Jhoira led her contingent to the wooden ladder. Its iron rails would be too hot to touch, and even the wood was bearable only with drake-feather gloves. Jhoira ascended. Diago Deerv followed. His comrades came in his wake. Jhoira reached the hatch above, turned the thick metal wheel that disengaged the locking mechanism, and flung back the hasp. Hot air roared up around her as she clambered from the shaft.

  Those in the chamber above-a bright, airy, space filled with giant, fat-walled furnaces and great slag buckets-turned to watch the sooty and sweating creatures emerge from their infernal underworld.

  Among the workers in the furnace room was Teferi. The young man had traded impish games for a keen forcefulness of will and a relentless search for knowledge. Tall, lean, and wiry, Teferi was handsome and clear-eyed. His dark skin was yet unmarked by the care wrinkles of age, but his brown eyes held an amazingly intense focus. Though chronologically he was one-third Jhoira’s age, they seemed physical as well as metaphysical twins now.

  “Jhoira,” he said, approaching her. The mage and the artificer were equal partners in this endeavor, overseeing the full deployment of the mana rig. “How many conduits do you have working now?”

  “Twenty-five, if this one holds,” Jhoira responded.

  “That should be enough to fire all five furnaces,” Teferi noted with approval. He flashed her an appreciative and dazzling smile.

  “It’s only a tenth of the major pipe ways,” Jhoira replied. “I still can’t get it out of my head there should be a lot more to this facility than making metal. The power this place could draw from the volcano would be sufficient to run fifty furnaces, but there aren’t fifty here. They must have used the power for something else.”

  Teferi moved in close to her, and a hint of his old capriciousness glinted in his eyes. He was still arrogant enough to use magic to enhance the twinkle in his eyes.

  “I tell you, the answer lies in the taboo halls. I’ve been begging you for months to explore the place with me-”

  “And jeopardize the alliance?” Jhoira hissed.

  “As long as the drake Gherridarigaaz lives, the alliance will not be broken,” Teferi said. “Come on. Say you’ll come with me.”

  Jhoira sighed in resignation. “Once the metal works are fully operational. Until then, we have no time for messing around.”

  “That could be years,” Teferi pressed.

  “Well, make years into months, and you won’t have to wait so long.”

  *

  The approach to Gherridarigaaz’s aerie was forbidding in the extreme. The lands in a ten-mile radius were goblin territory, and in it the voracious creatures were as thick as maggots on a carcass. In a two-mile radius, the dragon’s nest was surrounded by a boiling sea of lava. The aerie itself perched atop a jagged pinnacle of stone that stood like a crooked finger in the center of the caldera. Other tumbled monoliths lay in the bubbling basin. They were spaced just far enough apart that no terrestrial creature in its right mind would try jumping stone to stone to reach the nest.

  Neither Urza nor Karn were known for being in their right minds. Neither were they exactly terrestrial. They stood silently on the rocky verge of the magma pit. They had been in Shiv for over a year and still felt they walked the surface of an alien world. The audible shuffling of goblin feet, furtive and feral, in the wastelands behind them only added to the impression.

  Urza stared for some time at the distant drake’s nest, a huge encrustation of tree boughs woven together with black pitch and fired clay. He stooped, picked up a large stone, and hurled it with incredible force across the surface of the caldera. The stone skipped twelve times before melting away into nothing.

  “We are, each of us, capable of leaping stone to stone to get there,” Urza said idly.

  “Yes,” Karn replied.

  Urza nodded, his nostrils flaring. Any living creature would have been poisoned by the gasses venting in twisted columns past them.

  “I could cast a sorcery allowing us to lava-walk or to fly.”

  “Yes,” Karn said.

  Urza stooped to lift another stone, but thought better of it and squatted for some time, watching ghosts of steam promenade across the lava.

  “I could conjure my own fire drakes and send them to slay this one.”

  “Yes,” Karn said laconically. “You are Urza Planeswalker. You can do anything. You can wish us into the nest and wish Gherridarigaaz from existence. You can do anything you want. You are Urza Planeswalker.”

  It was Urza’s turn to be laconic. “Yes.”

  Karn turned toward the scintillating man. “You can do anything, so why did you trade me away for an army of Thran-metal artifacts?”

  The planeswalker’s eyes hardened. “You answer your own question. Why wouldn’t I trade one silver golem for an army of Thran-metal men? There is a great war coming. We must all make sacrifices.”

  “But you sacrifice me.”

  He had hardly spoken the words when, with a sudden, vertiginous whirl of movement, the cliff top melted away. The scarlet sea and sooty sky disappeared as well.

  Karn stood still. Urza was planeswalking them into the aerie. A human could survive that trip only by being carried in a protective embolism, or turned to stone, or made a flat creature of immutable geometry. Karn merely rode as he was. Urza had sent him on more troubling journeys.

  They arrived. The sooty sky remained above. The rest of the world was replaced by a vast, woven bowl of wood and clay, the lair of the fire drake. One corner was filled with a midden of bones, bleached and bare in the brimstone breezes. Beside it lay the half-eaten hulk of a small whale. It had apparently been plucked from the water like a herring caught by a kingfisher. The reek of the rotting sea creature was borne outward on clouds of flies. It mixed with the stench of sulfur and another smell-savage and salty and keen-edged like wood smoke-Gherridarigaaz. The great drake herself lay in the opposite corner of the nest. She seemed at the moment only a huge pile of red skin, scales, feathers, and fur. Her great muzzle oozed twin streams of smoke. Soot tangled languidly among her spiky brows and rangy mantle. A pair of massive claws lay beside her face. Wings of skin folded over her flanks. The creature’s scaly tail coiled on the rock-hard base of the nest.

  Urza stepped toward the creature and said, without preamble, “I am Urza Planeswalker. I can kill you with a thought. I will kill you with a thought if you make any move to harm us, and I will kill you unless you cease your attacks upon the Viashino settlement.”

  The drake slowly lifted her head. Giant lids drew back from slit-pupiled eyes, filled with gold and black striations. The beast spoke. Her voice was vast and purring. “Not much for parley, are you?”

  “Our message is understood,” Urza said with finality.

  “Understood, yes,” the drake responded. “Obeyed, no.”

  “You have no alternative,” Urza said.

  “I do have an alternative,” Gherridarigaaz corrected. “Death is an alternative.”

  “What creature would choose death over life?”

  “A mother would,” came the immediate response. “You have clearly not been a father.”

  Urza cast a long glance at the silver man at his side. “I have been a father.”

  “Oh, yes,” purred the drake in remembrance. “Urza Planeswalker. I’m well enough aware of human mythology. Yes, you had a son. Harbin was his name. You blinded him when you destroyed Argoth. Some say you even sank his boat and killed him.”

  “I tried to keep him away from the war,” Urza replied as if in reflex. “What I did, I did to save all Dominaria.”

  “You sacrificed your son to save the world,” the drake said. “That is the difference between us, Planeswalker. I would sacrifice the world to save my son. I will not give up the fight to free him.”

  “Rhammidarigaaz chose to leave you. He chose to join the Viashino,” Urza pointed out.

  “Your son chose to join the war.”

  Urza’s features drew into an angry knot. “I could kill you now.”

  “Yes, you could, Planeswalker. History says you would, but why, then, am I still alive?”

  Urza cast one last, fierce glance at the creature. “You have been warned.” With a thought, he and the silver man departed the fiery aerie.

  Barrin ran. Fronds slapped him. He thrashed through underbrush.

  The thing behind him was huge and sinuous. It slithered in his wake-a giant python, muscular, fleet, silent and cold-blooded. Its horned head was as large as the mage master himself. If it unhinged its jaw, it could swallow him whole. Two man-sized bulges distended its gut already.

  “There have to be sorceries to defeat this thing. I know hundreds of them. It’s just a matter of thinking … something about swamp-walking-?”

  The mage master ran. He had been in the heat of combat when the thing had broken through the line. The beast’s sudden appearance had interrupted a complex casting. Mana burn had lashed Barrin. He had fallen back. Jangled, he had wracked his brain for a defense but found none and ran.

  This thing wasn’t Phyrexian. It was summoned. The python had been invoked by a Phyrexian capable of casting spells. That was new. Apparently K’rrik had been decanting time-resistant mutants long enough to raise a wizard from their ranks, a wizard or two-or perhaps a small army of them. The giant serpent behind him was not only a terrifying man-eater, it was also a harbinger of greater evils to come.

  Breath sawed Barrin’s throat. Vines clawed his arms. The creature’s cold breath billowed out around him. It almost had him. He redoubled his speed. Think! Think! Treacherous ground stole his feet. With a curse, Barrin tumbled. He crashed through a brake of undergrowth and smashed against a tree.

  The serpent coiled into view. It reared up on a broad, shimmering belly of scales. Its mouth glimmered with teeth. Its jaw yawned wide and dislocated.

  Barrin clawed behind the tree trunk. He hissed instinctually and glared into the thing’s eyes.

  “What is that summonation spell Teferi is working on? A creature that can cross time streams … Not the imps, but the other one-Teferi’s Duck? No, that’s wrong.”

  The monster coiled rapidly around the mage. It looped the tree and lunged.

  “Teferi’s Drake!”

  A yellow-skinned dragon phased into being beside Barrin. It spread its wings in the tight confines of the jungle, and its head darted about angrily. Though the python was gigantic, in the shadow of the drake, it seemed only a worm beside a chicken. The drake’s head jabbed downward. Its beaklike mouth snatched up the python.

  The serpent riled in the monster’s mouth. One of the man-sized lumps in it convulsed too, whether in defiance or digestion, Barrin couldn’t tell. Arching its neck backward, the yellow drake sucked down the python and swallowed it in one gulp.

  Barrin slid back down beside the tree, panting in dread. If he had been killed by that python, there would have been no one left to summon Urza, no one to lead the students. And there would be more giant pythons, more minions of evil. More Phyrexian mages …

  How many wizards does K’rrik have?

  Into his musings came the acute realization that the summoned drake stared down at him. Its eyes were at once empty and accusing, like the eyes of Karn. Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, it phased out of being.

  That was the flaw in Teferi’s spell. To date, the creatures he summoned could cross time rifts but remained in existence for only minutes. Barrin had known of this side effect, but he had been desperate. The drake had been created only to fight, disposable.

  How like Karn….

  Karn sat on a stone escarpment on the mountain side of the mana rig. The ceramic arteries beneath the structure glowed with pulsing lava, pumped up from the caldera below. Within the plant, massive articulated arms would be cranking huge shafts. Steam shot in vast columns from the top of the rig. The whole thing rumbled and roared in a foul-tempered fury. The rig seemed a great beast, crouching in the red-black sunset, hissing into the sky, slurping from the lava pool.

  They had brought it to life. After a year and a half of labor, Jhoira and Teferi and Urza had brought it to life. Jhoira had proven herself yet again the critical connection between Urza and the folk under his command. Teferi had come into his own as an innovative leader and mage. Together they had achieved an uneasy alliance between the human students and the Viashino workers. Urza, meanwhile, strong-armed the drake Gherridarigaaz out of attacking the facility. Even his presence was enough to reduce the constant goblin border battles to only sporadic incidents. The mountaintop was ruled by an iron fist in a velvet glove. All had progressed according to plan, and the first new castings of Thran metal were only moments from being poured.

  They had brought it to life, but Karn felt dead.

  Perhaps it was because Teferi had replaced him as Jhoira’s closest companion. Their work to vivify the facility had made the close contact necessary. Their species had made the close contact welcomed. Karn felt no jealousy about this growing relationship and even was happy for Jhoira to have a friend made of flesh and bone. But between her work and Teferi, Jhoira no longer had time for long strolls or afternoon conversations with the silver man. He wished again for those bleak days together in the guard towers of Tolaria, but that was not what dragged at Karn.

  No, the feeling of dread and death came from the sentence on his life. When all was said and done, he would belong to the lizard men. Urza had offered to move his intellectual-affective cortex to a new shell of Thran-metal, though the man could not promise Karn’s mind would move with it.

 

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