Bloodlines Read online

  “One who is strong enough to be able to think, before I speak,” he answered with scathing disdain. Only in afterthought did Gatha wonder at his rash action.

  The warlord sat forward abruptly. Muscles bunched and twitched, and one hand strayed toward the short stabbing sword he wore.

  “You speak to me? Varagh? You, lowlander?” His dark eyes flashed dangerously.

  There was nothing for it now but to establish himself in some form of ritual duel, a test of strength. Gatha walked slowly toward the warlord, carefully drawing mana from the lands he had touched in his recent travels. He remembered the river delta of Agderisk, its chaotic channels of muddied waters. Power swelled within his mind, begging for release. Eyes never flinching from the hostile warlord, the mage stepped up onto the first tier with calm and deliberate motion.

  Varagh stood abruptly, one hand darting for his sword as the other clamped down hard on Gatha’s shoulder, pinning the mage in place. Such deliberation in killing saved Gatha’s life. The mage brought up one hand in a twisting motion. Energy danced from his fingertips and into the warlord’s eyes. The giant man stumbled, sword falling from nerveless fingers, blinking away the sudden confusion. Gatha gathered himself up and physically forced the larger man from the platform so that he now stood at the same height, eye to eye, as if physically dwarfed.

  The warlord rounded on Gatha, spinning in a fluid, catlike motion. Gatha thrust his left hand forward, sparks of blue energy dancing around his outstretched palm. Snarling, Varagh clawed his own face with his thick fingernails and then charged forward. It caught the mage, who had expected the Keldon to take more time to recover, off guard. He dodged to one side, releasing another blast of mind-numbing energy. This time the sparks danced outward…

  …and glanced off the warlord’s bared chest.

  Gatha was picked up by his shoulder and hip then slammed down onto the tier. Darkness swam before his eyes. He felt detached, as if this could not possibly be happening. Battle magic! This is not how I die, he thought. Even so, he saw through the haze as Varagh reached one hand back and clench it into a hammerlike fist.

  A dark blur landed heavily behind the Keldon, grabbed the raised fist and pulled it back. The pressure eased from Gatha’s shoulder. He sat up and scrambled backward until he found the next tier. Another warlord had pulled Gatha’s attacker away. Now the two circled each other, crouched low and barring teeth. Varagh shouted, attacked, and was dealt a cruel clawing across the face. The answering punch was weak, and the new warlord caught it up, snapping the arm at the elbow as easily as matchwood. Varagh never uttered a sound for the pain. He simply stood there with a snarl of anger on his face while the other warlord held onto the wrist of his broken arm. He glanced down then bowed his head at the neck.

  The victor released the wounded arm, turned his back on Varagh, and stepped back onto the first tier, looking down on the mage. Gatha came to his feet slowly.

  “I Kreyohl,” the new warlord said in Argivian. He reached out slowly, placed a hand on Gatha’s chest, and shoved him from the tier.

  The mage stumbled and nearly fell to his knees. Anger welled inside Gatha, but he held it in check. This one might know battle magic as well, and there was no fighting them all at any rate. He broke eye contact and bowed his head as he’d seen the other warlord do. Both doyen retook their seats, Varagh below and Kreyohl on the next tier higher up.

  Kreyohl studied Gatha in silence for a moment. “You alive because I hear you more. Not want you dead.”

  Yet, Gatha finished for him. Still, he recognized now the procedure he had witnessed, the stronger male disciplining the inferior. They respected strength and little else.

  “I can make you stronger,” he said cautiously, not wanting to offend but not ready to give up. “I have special magics, and I need only time and a little help.”

  No one answered right away. Gatha saw Kreyohl glance from the side of his eyes, obviously reading the body language of his neighboring warlords.

  “You make many promises,” he said slowly. “Maybe keep, maybe don’t.” He paused. “What can you show us now?”

  Now there was a sentiment Gatha could understand. Unfortunately, it was also one he had not decided a ready answer for. Few were those who thought of the present first and future later. It was that thought, of the present, that prompted a solution.

  “I can scry the world of Dominaria.” How to say that more simply? “Magic sight. See troubles and wars. Today and any day, where the Keld might find the best employment.” No, not correct. “Take the best plunder.”

  That appealed to the assembly. Subtle nods were passed. A warlord on Kreyohl’s tier spoke the group consensus. “Prove it, and your work supported.”

  Gatha smiled, breathing out between white teeth a cloud of frozen vapor. Proving himself was not a difficulty. It was, in fact, one of his favorite pastimes.

  * * *

  Two years and Gatha still could not stand the smell. The small room stank of the peat used for walls, corrupting the crisp scent of new snow which had fallen in the night. The tan wooden planking laid directly over earth shifted slightly beneath Gatha’s feet as he crossed the temporary laboratory. He slapped his hands together for warmth and held them over a barrel of slowly burning animal fat. The sharp, final tock of a clockwork timer drew his attention to another table, but the sound of rock being quarried distracted him from checking results. He paused at a window cut into the southern exposure, looking downhill on the site of his permanent labs. His labs.

  A winding trail cut down the snowy mountainside toward an area roughly leveled by natural erosion. The site was large, befitting the importance of the work Gatha intended to do there and the efforts he had already put forth on behalf of the Keldon people. A doyenne, one of the Keldon matriarchs, strutted imperiously around the site overseeing the project. The females oversaw everything which was not associated directly with warfare.

  Slaves worked to burst away some remaining outcroppings. The dark gray rock was collected and then moved by colos to the building pile used by the Keldon builders. Among that small percentage of Keldons ill-suited to war—dishonored and sent to live as general laborers, traders or farmers—these outcasts would rate master builders in many nations Gatha could name. They worked slowly and methodically, building to Gatha’s specifications but following their own designs when practical. In his fourteenth year of self-imposed exile from Tolaria, Gatha could finally hope to begin soon a serious continuation of his earlier work.

  The Keldon armies were constantly on the move these days, preying on Dominaria wherever Gatha’s scrying and a nation’s coin brought them. The mage’s commitments called for a great deal of his time and efforts, especially when the council preferred his presence at the Necropolis higher up the mountain. Those efforts were now being scaled back in favor of his experimentation. Permission had been granted to begin his work on slaves and second-class Keldon citizens.

  He had already begun setting up his Matrix and the rest of his equipment in this shack the doyenne had built for his temporary use. The first trials on native Keldons showed incredible response. Slaves were not quite as easily altered, but they served as good subjects for initial experiments. The colos were even more so, their tough nature adapting to his changes and giving Gatha more ideas. He used the colos as testing boards for his more radical ideas, moved up from there to slaves, and then to the Keldons to observe an end result. No one complained of his few setbacks. Many of his Keldon subjects actually expressed appreciation that the mage had found a way they could serve their nation one final time. Gatha drank in the heady results as each day brought him closer to resuming a full work load. His work had certainly found a home here in the bloodlines of Keld.

  Urza was unprepared for the Phyrexian attack. One moment the planeswalker had been studying a cliff face for traces of Thran artifice, and in the next, a stream of hellish energy had slammed into him from behind and pinned him to the rock wall. It had required of the ‘walker every
ounce of his willpower to hold together his form in the face of the surprise attack. The second negator hit him from the side, a flurry of rending claws and razor-sharp fangs. Only by throwing the second Phyrexian into the energy attack of the first did Urza manage to break away and recapture a portion of his strength.

  Now the three danced about wildly. Urza moved with preternatural speed. His attention divided between two negators, they came close to matching him. Lightning crackled at Urza’s fingertips, striking out like some kind of whip, keeping the negators at bay. Where the energy touched the creatures it split the armor, exposing black, corrupted flesh beneath. He couldn’t seem to reach anything vital in these robust creatures, and the energy cannon that replaced the arm of one Phyrexian continued to strike at him with dangerous effect.

  Wherever the reddish stream touched him, the equivalence of mortal pain ate into his concentration. The more he devoted to keeping his form intact the less he had to deal with the his own offense. Urza settled into a defensive pattern, gambling that the Phyrexians could not come up with another surprise while he built up his own power.

  The negator predisposed to physical assault uttered a long and piercing shriek that threw a disrupting ripple throughout the ‘walker’s entire form. A wisp of fiery energy from the cannon caught Urza in the arm, and for the briefest second he recalled the mortal pain of a burn as well as the disruption to his immortal form, a sensation he would have been happy to live without remembering.

  Drawing power from his memory of the Hurloon Mountains, calling forth the powerful mana they offered, Urza cast lightning from both hands which began piling up in front of him. The collection pulsed and grew, spitting out arcs of snapping energy. No more time left to him, Urza cast the large ball of lightning forward. It sped toward the negator brandishing the cannon. It dodged the first pass but was caught up trying to shake the inexorable advance.

  It gave Urza all the time he needed. Bringing his staff to bear, the planeswalker triggered one of its many functions: a sonic attack, one that he had devised decades before to deal with the Phyrexian infestation of Tolaria. The sound interfered with the composition of glistening oil—the lifeblood of Phyrexian living artifice. The high-pitched harmonics slammed into the second negator with incredible force, throwing it back and pinning it to the earth. Sprays of gray-black liquid gushed from the negator’s open wounds, and it trembled and shook. Urza moved forward, the head of his staff pointed directly at the creature. With a final spasm the negator fell still, its fluids leaking into the ground and staining the soil black.

  Only then did Urza notice that the second negator had ignored the attack of harmonic sound. It still dodged about nimbly, evading the pulsing collection of energies that trailed after it relentlessly. There would be no escaping the strike, only delay, but the ‘walker couldn’t be sure of it being enough to kill the negator. Tapping the mana as he had a moment before, Urza quickly built up another such electrical storm and flung it toward the cornered Phyrexian. Weak from the attacks against him and concerned that the remaining negator might have sent a summons to others, Urza cast his form into the chaos that existed between worlds and ‘walked away.

  While the pain of the burn had long faded, its memory continued to worry the back of his mind.

  * * *

  Flanked by four of the armored Phyrexian soldiers, their black armor gleaming dull orange in the fiery glow of the lava tubes, Davvol toured the main facility concerned with the production of flowstone. The massive, bladed dials spinning in their housing above generated most of the mechanical power required. Giant corkscrews pulled up the lava in black-crusted tubes from the geological furnaces of Rath far underground. They would be cooled by waters siphoned off a nearby lake and then fed farther up into the processing machinery. Yellow steam escaped the joints of nearby pistons, scalding and sulfurous. The machinery this far down had turned rust-red over time, standing exposed to the sulfurous steam.

  Davvol filed away a mental note that the machinery should be overhauled as soon as the secondary additions were built and in full production. The megalithic proportions of two new attractors demanded an incredible investment of labor and time—another fifty years of work before the new facilities would be ready, this as the Vec and the Phyrexians measured time, both referring back to the old Dominarian calendar of their ancestors. The Coracin native measured years a bit longer. It didn’t matter either way. Davvol never forgot a detail he had committed to memory. It was now one hundred thirty-three years since the Phyrexians brought him away from Coracin, and he could review notes made to himself over a century back that had still not come due.

  So far beyond his normal lifespan, the Phyrexian collaborator still resented being trapped in the weak and diseased body for which Coracin physicians had once predicted an early demise. Now he had certainly outlived those physicians and any other Coracin living then. The Phyrexians kept him alive and offered a few improvements—when it suited their needs—but little else. They guaranteed him virtual immortality so long as he kept the machines running here on Rath, so long as he completed whatever task was set before him—so long as Croag decided that he was useful.

  The Vec workers, a humanoid race with blunt features and knobby joints, stood nearby during the inspection. Their pale skin—from so long trapped away from any sun—flushed in the room’s heat. They despised him. He knew that, but they would never do anything so long as the Phyrexian troops stood guard. Any one of the spindly limbed warriors could kill them all, easily, before Davvol was put in any mortal danger that the Phyrexians could not repair. That was the trick, to beat the Phyrexians’ ability to remake and improve. Davvol was learning something of this in his attempts to kill the hated Urza Planeswalker.

  “I want production increased,” he said to the Vec supervisor in charge.

  Nothing indicated a difference between her position and a common laborer, but Davvol still knew. It paid to single out those who should know that their lives would answer last if any trouble should arise. His policy was simple. If a supervisor failed to accomplish the tasks given to him, he would watch those who reported to him die. The policy was quite effective, and the Vec policed themselves to keep supervisors who would not throw away their lives needlessly.

  “The borders must be pushed back faster with enough excess for my special use. See that it happens.”

  The Vec nodded, sullen but compliant. Sweat ran down her face. Her face a mask, only her brilliant blue eyes spoke her hatred.

  Davvol departed, leaving behind two guards. The others came with him back down a long corridor lined with corroded metal pipes that ended in a large balcony open to the outside. He stepped up onto his flying disc. Traveling around the Stronghold was no easy feat. From the caldera rim he had been unable to accurately judge its size. It was better than three kilometers in height as measured from the lower machinery to the top of Stronghold’s cyclone funnel tower and twice that in width, its entirety filled with Phyrexian artifice or denizens over which he had authority.

  His guards joined him, and Davvol mentally commanded the disc to rise and move through the open wall. The immense cavern, almost a second caldera beneath the first, knew a perpetual twilight. Some lights issued from the bottom side of the Stronghold, while the Vec city below offered slightly brighter areas where its thinly arrayed neighborhoods clustered together into shared warrens. The air was warm and very humid, with condensing steam eventually falling down onto the city as a caustic rain. The disc rose rapidly toward the sculpted ceiling and then through one of the holes that dilated open and allowed a vent to the upper caldera. Davvol noted that he must—in the next year or so—look into the sulfuric rain, not that he cared for the Vec’s troubles. The escape of so much mineral content in the steam spoke of inefficiency in the machinery, which must translate into slower production of flowstone.

  Flowstone, a wondrous substance. He had discovered its merits almost immediately upon assuming responsibility for Rath. Reaching into the wide sleeve th
at covered his right arm, he removed from a hidden pocket the sample of flowstone he carried with him always. Warmed by the trip into the bowels of the Stronghold’s machinery, the fist-sized hunk of tan stone still seemed unremarkable, as plain as it had been when the steward had torn it from the barren landscape that stretched between horizons. It was so much more. Without much effort, Davvol mentally shaped it into a series of rough figures—a cylinder then a cube. The tan substance would soften under his command then melt like a candle in an oven, except, the stone would not run out of his hand but toward whatever new shape he desired—a ship, an egg, a short staff. It was much harder than any regular stone and apparently had no limits on what it might accomplish. He concentrated a bit more, and the short staff melded into a knife with a fine bone handle and a very sharp edge. A touch more thought and the handle softened as if wrapped in leather. Davvol had made such weapons with blades so fine as to be able to score the hardest Phyrexian metal.

  Flowstone apparently obeyed those with power over the plane of Rath, both in small portions like he held or in massive plains of the material. An evincar, named by Phyrexia, would possesses full mastery. Now Davvol and Croag shared that power, the member of Phyrexia’s Inner Circle a permanent guest of the Stronghold and constantly looking over Davvol’s shoulder. Davvol did not doubt with whom Rath’s final authority currently rested, but Croag showed little interest in manipulating the flowstone, and it was control of the flowstone that might end up being the deciding factor of who truly ruled Rath. The knife softened and changed shape in his hand.

  The disc exited the upper vent and flew over the Stronghold’s lower surfaces. Black metal gleamed as lightning cascaded in the sky high above and bathed the caldera in an unnatural and beautiful red wash. Davvol sent the disc on a long glide around the main tower to the throne room. In his hand he held an exquisite flowstone crown. Yes, flowstone was one of the two paths into full power here on Rath, power Davvol meant to have.