J. Robert King - Artifact Cycle 3 - Time Streams

396 Pages·2016·1.13 MB·English

by  King J. Robert

T S
IME TREAMS
ARTIFACT CYCLE • BOOK III
J. Robert King
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J. Robert King
Prologue
Urza says he's sane. Perhaps he is. Measures of sanity
among planeswalkers are hard to come by. He has lived for
over three thousand years. He heals by merely willing it.
With a thought, he steps from world to world to world. His
very appearance is a matter of convenience, clothes and
even features projected by his mind. How can conventional
notions of sanity apply to a planeswalker?
Perhaps they cannot, but his madness began before he
was a planeswalker. Three thousand years ago, a mortal
Urza battled his mortal brother. Their sibling rivalry turned
fratricidal. So began the Brothers' War. In his rage to kill
Mishra, Urza enlisted the armies of the world, sank the isle
of Argoth, gutted the continent of Terisiare, and wiped
whole nations from the globe. He ushered in an ice age. In
repayment for all this madness, he became a planeswalker.
Urza says he regrets the destruction. True regret would
be a good sign.
It wasn't regret that later sent Urza on his own private
invasion of Phyrexia. It was revenge for his brother.
Somehow, Urza convinced himself he hadn't killed Mishra,
that the Phyrexian Gix had done it. True, Gix seduced
Mishra with promises of awesome power and in the end
transformed him into a monstrous amalgam of flesh and
artifice. But Urza was Mishra's slayer. Not in his mind,
though.
In the mind of madness, Urza blamed Gix and plotted
to get even. His motive was mad, and his invasion madder
still. Urza attacked Phyrexia—one planeswalker against
armies of demonic monstrosities. He lost, of course. He
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couldn't defeat a whole world and was nearly torn to pieces
trying.
Tail between his legs, Urza retreated to Serra's Realm, a
place of angels and floating clouds. There he convalesced,
but he never truly recovered. Madness still haunted him,
and so did Phyrexia. Gix followed on his tail. No sooner
had Urza left Serra's Realm, thinking himself whole and
hale, than Gix and his demons arrived. A war began in
heaven. That place, like any other where Urza had chosen
to dwell, was decimated. Centuries later, it is still shrinking
in its long collapse.
When I point out these mad indiscretions, Urza shrugs.
He claims he regained his sanity after all that. He credits
his newfound perspective to Xantcha and Ratepe—"two
dear friends who sacrificed themselves to slay the demon
Gix, close the portal to Phyrexia, and save my life. To
them, I am forever grateful."
True gratitude would be a good sign, too.
Urza has never, in his three millennia of life, shown
true gratitude nor had a "dear friend." I have known him
for three decades. For two of those, I have worked side by
side with him at the academy we established here on
Tolaria. I am not his dear friend. No one is. Most of the
tutors and students at the academy don't even know his
real name, calling him Master Malzra. The last person who
was close enough to Urza to be a dear friend was his
brother, and everyone knows what happened to him.
No, Urza is incapable of regret and gratitude, of having
dear friends, not that there haven't been folk like Xantcha,
Ratepe, Serra, and I, who genuinely love the man and
would give our lives for him. But he seems incapable of
returning our affection.
That's not enough to declare him insane, of course. As I
said, measures of sanity among planeswalkers are hard to
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come by, but there is something mad about Urza's blithe
belief that Xantcha and Ratepe sacrificed themselves, that
Serra's Realm and Argoth sacrificed themselves, that
Mishra sacrificed himself.... It seems everyone and
everything Urza claims to care about gets destroyed. And
what does that mean for me, his newest dear friend?

—Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria
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Part I
SCHOOL OF TIME
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Chapter 1
Jhoira stood at the edge of her world. Behind her lay
the isle of Tolaria, its palm forests and lecture halls overrun
with magical prodigies and clockwork creatures. It was a
realm of ceaseless tests and pointless trials and worries and
work, lots of work.
Before her lay the blue ocean, the blue sky, and the
illimitable world. Clouds piled into empyrean mountain
ranges above the shimmering sea. White waves broke on
the ragged rocks below. Beyond the thin, brilliant line of
the horizon, the whole world waited. Her soul mate was out
there somewhere, she dreamed. Everything was out there—
her homeland, her parents, her Shivan tribe, her future.
Jhoira sighed and slouched down to sit on a sun-
warmed shoulder of sandstone. Sea winds sent her long
black hair dancing about her thin shoulders. Breezes
coursed, warm and familiar, through her white student
robes. She'd spent many hours in this sunny niche, her
refuge from the academy, but lately the hideaway brought
her as much sadness as joy.
She'd been at the academy for eight years now, learning
all she could of machines. A prodigy when she arrived,
Jhoira was now a formidable artificer. She was also a
woman, or at eighteen nearly so, and was weary of the
school and the kids, of brimstone and machine oil. She was
sick to death of artifice and illusion and wanted something
real—someone real.
Jhoira closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath of salty air
into her lungs. Her soul mate would be tall and bronze-
skinned, like the young Ghitu tribesmen back home—
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keen-eyed and strong. He would be smart, yes, but not like
Teferi and the other boys who tried to get Jhoira's
attention through juvenile antics and unsubtle innuendoes.
He would be a man, and he would be mysterious. That was
most important of all. She could not be in love with a man
unless, at the core of his being, there was mystery.
She opened her eyes and shifted her weight, one sandal
sending up a puff of dust. "I'm a fool. There's not a man
like that in the world." Even if there were, she'd never get
to meet him, not while she was stuck on this blasted island.
* * * * *
Standing, the silver man awoke. He had moved before,
had walked and spoken before. He had occupied this
enormous body of metal, peered out of its silvery eyes, and
lifted things in its massive hands. Before it had been always
as if in a dream. Now he was awake. Now he was alive.
The laboratory around him was bright and clean.
Master Malzra liked it clean—clean but cluttered. One wall
held hundreds of sketches and refinements of sketches,
some in ink, some in lead, some in chalk. Another bristled
with specialized implements— metal lathes, beam saws,
injection molds, presses, rollers, bellows, drills. A third wall
bore racks of cogs and struts and other mechanical castings.
A fourth held ranks of assembled mechanisms. A fifth—
very few of the school's rooms were square—allowed egress
into the room. In the center of the space, a great black
forge rose. Its smokestack climbed up and away through the
dome above. A second-floor gallery ringed the fringes of
the room. Up in those balconies even now, young eyes
peered down on the result of Master Malzra's latest
experiment. They peered down on the silver man.
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The silver man peered back. He felt frightened,
awkward, shy. He wondered what they thought about
him—wondered and cared in a way he never had before.
Everything was like that. He had seen this laboratory many
times before, but he never would have used terms like clean
and cluttered and bright to describe it or the man who had
created it. Now the silver man perceived more than just
things. He perceived the organization of things, their
disposition, and what they implied about their creator. The
laboratory was a study in the mind of Master Malzra—
ancient, obsessed, brilliant, tireless, preoccupied, short-
sighted, grandiose....
Master Malzra, meanwhile, studied him. The man's gaze
was penetrating. Folds of aged skin drew up skeptically
beneath one eye. His nostrils flared, but he didn't seem to
breathe at all. One soot-blackened hand trembled slightly
as he raised it to scratch his ash-blond beard. He
swallowed, blinking—but with eyes like that, as hard and
sharp as diamonds, it seemed he didn't need to blink at all.
"Any noticeable change in the probe's energy profile,
Barrin?" Malzra asked over his shoulder.
It was a strange greeting. The silver man felt somewhat
offended.
"A reasonable enough question," came the response—
from Malzra's second, a master mage. Barrin stepped from
beside an injection mold. He wiped grit from his hands
with a white cloth. "Why don't you ask him?"
Malzra blinked again. "Ask whom?"
"Ask him," the mage repeated, quirking one corner of
his mouth. "The probe."
Malzra pursed his lips. He nodded. "Probe, I am Master
Malzra, your creator. I wish to know if you notice any
change in your energy profile."
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"I remember who you are," responded the silver man.
His voice was deep and resonant in his metal form. "And I
notice a very definite change in my energy profile. I am
awake."
A sibilance of voices came from the balcony.
Malzra seemed almost to smile. "Ah, you are awake.
Good. As you are doubtless aware, we've made some
modifications to you, hoping to enhance your performance,
your intellect, and your capacity for social integration." He
ground his teeth and could not seem to come out with
anything else. Malzra glanced back to Barrin for help.
The mage—lean, middle-aged in a white work smock—
approached. He patted the silver man's shoulder. "Hello.
We're glad you've woken up. How do you feel?"
"Confused," the silver man heard himself say, then in a
voice of wonder, he went on. "Everything seems to have a
new dimension. I am filled with conflicting information."
Barrin asked, "Conflicting information?"
"Yes," replied the silver man. "I sense, for example, that
though Master Malzra is your superior in rank and age, he
often defers to you due to his social disinclinations."
"Social disinclinations?" Barrin prompted.
"He prefers the company of machines to that of
people," clarified the silver man.
Titters of humor came from the gallery. Malzra's
expression darkened as he glanced up.
The probe continued, "Even now, I perceive that my
observation, though accurate, displeases Master Malzra,
amuses the students, and embarrasses you."
Barrin flushed slightly. "True enough." He turned to
Malzra. "I could run some magical tests, but even without
them, it's clear the intellectual and emotional components
of the implant are functioning."
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