Planeshift

Chapter 30

The Steam Beast was a crude nightmare, ten times the size of a titan engine. Driven by coal and oil, it streamed soot from a thousand knobby joints. Pistons shot explosively from pressure chambers. Drive shafts propelled the monster on six enormous legs. Its central body was a framework packed with hissing boilers. Foot-thick armor guarded the power plants from attack. The beast had no head but shoulders that sported hundreds of reaching arms. Each was tipped in huge titanium shears. Each could dart from the beast to rip apart whatever challenged it.

Urza and his five remaining titans-Taysir, Freyalise, Bo Levar, Windgrace, and Guff-challenged it. They seemed badgers before a bear, except that this bear had hundreds of arms.

Rockets blazed from Urza's wrists. They shot toward the beast, cracked off its armor, and spiraled away. Trailing gray smoke, the rockets rose into the murk of Phyrexia's fourth sphere. One by one, they impacted the pipe-lined ceiling and exploded. Oil and fire rained down.

The Steam Beast's shears lashed out. Blades gnawed one leg of Urza's titan engine and cut through its power conduit.

Growling, Urza invoked a distortion field. Blue magic crackled from his fingertips to trace along the nearest shears. Energy mapped them, lines on a schematic. Urza twisted the lines. Metal shrieked and bent. Blades ground against each other. Joints failed. Bolts popped. A dozen metal arms clattered to the ground.

Still, there were hundreds more. Shears etched scars on Commodore Guff's piloting bulb. They worried Taysir's powerstones. They gripped Lord Windgrace's foreleg.

Urza planeswalked from the battleground and instantly reappeared. His titan feet came down on the back of the Steam Beast.

The iron armor was soot black and slick with oil. Urza's engine lost its footing. He slipped and fell to one knee. The fall saved him, for scores of scissor-tipped arms snapped overhead.

Urza rammed one fist down into the superstructure. Boilers crowded below, organs in the monster's torso. Blistering heat peeled from them. Urza spread his mechanical fingers. Sorceries sprang from the ends of them and fanned out through the beast. The spells struck adjacent boilers and bored through their thick metal. Steam shot angrily from each hole, and then fire. Metal bounded out, swelling before breaking.

Urza yanked his arm back as shrapnel flew. He crouched upon the greasy back plate, saved a second time. Hurtling hunks of boiler rang the armor like a gong. Anything within the beast's torso was doomed.

Shrapnel penetrated adjacent boilers, setting off a chain reaction. The beast rattled and boomed. Its arms trembled and went slack. Creaking, it tipped forward and collapsed to the ground. Steam poured in a storm cloud from it.

Urza rode the beast to ground. Once it was still, he caught his breath and stood, wreathed in mist. It parted, showing him to the other five titans. They stared in amazement.

There will be more, Urza told them. His mind worked to fuse the severed conduits in his leg. Make what repairs you

can immediately, and then fan out around the vat yards. Watch for dragon engines. I will meanwhile plant the last soul bomb in the reactor at its center.

Bo Levar snorted, flinging away the arm that had almost shattered his helm, Great. I'm sick of this place. What's the fifth sphere like?

Huffing in his pilot bulb, Commodore Guff paged through a book. A nasty sphere, by all accounts.

Shocking! replied Bo Levar in imitation of the commodore.

Ignoring him, Guff said, A great sea of boiling oil, thickening below to sludge and then to rock. The firmament is more pipe work, with large ports that suck.

The sky sucks, the ground sucks… sounds like all the other spheres, Bo Levar griped.

Are you a vacuous idiot? raged Urza. The blank looks on his companions' faces only spurred him on. Are you all so soulless that you cannot marvel at mile-high furnaces and steam-powered magnabeasts? At living metal and mechanisms that reproduce and grow? At the absolute blend of biology and physics, artifice and magic?

Bo Levar had about enough. You speak as though you love this place-and here we are to destroy it.

Yes, we will destroy it, Urza agreed, but we are destroying a masterpiece. You must understand that.

None of us understands that, Urza. To us, this place is a living hell. We can't understand why you think it's a heaven or why, in thinking what you do, that you still want to destroy it. We figured it was just another part of your whacked-out mind-the same part that made you love Mishra and destroy him, and love Xantcha and destroy her, and love Barrin and destroy him. The one thing we do understand is that Phyrexia's got to go, and you're the only one who knows and loves it well enough to destroy it.

That's it. That's the totality of our agreement. We're not on board with your perverse little pleasures. We're not on board with your sacrificing planeswalkers. We're not on board with any of this except destroying Phyrexia.

Freyalise, Taysir, Windgrace, and Guff nodded.

Urza felt a stab of panic. Why had he put his trust in such worthless comrades? Why had he brought them to this jewel box, swine to trammel treasure? Wallowing beasts. They could think of nothing but the mud of Dominaria. If they could only follow their brains and eyes and hearts, they would know the glory of this place. They were pigs in a temple.

At last, Urza said, Are you… turning on me?

Waving a damaged arm outward, Bo Levar said, Just plant your damn bomb and take us to the fifth sphere.

We'll skip the fifth, going straight to the sixth-

Whatever, Bo Levar interrupted. Just go. We'll hold the perimeter.

Nodding numbly, Urza turned.

His titan suit trembled. It was no longer the power conduit that caused the weakness. It was uncertainty. Ever since the death of Barrin, there had been a creeping weakness in him. It had grown more pervasive each day. It jangled his fingers and hands, and now his whole being.

They would betray him, these five. They had come along to advance their own aims, with no true interest in the fate of Phyrexia. What a fool he had been! Of course, when they rebelled, he could kill them. It was just that he had not planned on killing them. He had not planned on descending to the ninth sphere alone.

The thought was like a fresh breeze. It calmed him, stilled the center of his being. The creeping weakness solidified into something new. Descend to the ninth sphere alone. That would be glorious, to stand there before

Yawgmoth, to slay him, to see Phyrexia as Yawgmoth saw it.

Under Urza's titanic tread, glass shattered. Oil gushed. Naked creatures thrashed. Newts. Phyrexian newts. Urza had reached the vat fields without even realizing it. He lifted his foot. Oil and glass dripped away. Creatures writhed. Before him, to the distant horizon, vats extended in golden rows. Causeways topped them, and vat priests ran atop the causeways.

Urza smiled. He took another step. Catwalks buckled under his weight. Vats cracked. Oil burst out across the ground. Newts died in tens and twenties. He stepped again. It was like splashing through rainwater. It was like playing in a golden brook.

Ahead, the rows converged on a large central structure in a huge circular well. Radiance flooded out of that pit. Power held aloft the main reactor core. It seemed a beehive, its globular outer walls filled with openings. Raw energy swarmed it. White-hot tracers buzzed up from the well and entered the reactor holes.

A single soul bomb positioned at the edge of that energy storm would unbalance the core and send it toppling into the pit. It would unleash the native power of Phyrexia and gut much of the fourth sphere.

Urza approached the pit and knelt. The knees of his titan engine drove glass spikes through the newts beneath him.

He took another fortifying breath. This destruction. This mad destruction. What could justify it? Fear? Fear that Yawgmoth would do to Dominaria what he had done to Phyrexia? Urza would have been glad to see such magnificent living machines roaming the planet. It would have been like the dragon epoch, an age of power and physics, before humans had muddled everything with their metaphysics, their morals.

Reaching down, Urza cracked loose one of the vats. It came away intact, like a crystal goblet. Urza lifted the vat up before his piloting bulb. He peered out of his glass bubble at the naked creature in the vat.

Urza saw himself. He was that formless newt, pathetic and pitiable. He was the weak raw material from which Yawgmoth would make something powerful. The premonition faded, and Urza was again in his titan suit.

The newt convulsed impotently in the tank of golden oil. It could sense its imminent demise.

Urza slid the tips of his claws through the top of the vat. Gently, he clutched the newt's head and lifted it free. It seemed a sardine in his fingers, flapping back and forth and flinging oil.

Urza laid the creature in the metallic palm of his titan suit. It gulped helplessly. Urza prodded it.

Here was the weakness at the heart of strength-this unformed pupae, this human.

It died in his hand, suffocated. The sardine-man lay still. It was just as well. All these newts would die in the blast. Urza hurled the thing out toward the beaming pit. The body caught fire even before it struck the mantle of energy. Then it was gone-a better fate than lingering in that helpless putrescence-though not as good as final compleation.

Urza unshipped the last soul bomb from its armored compartment. The device shimmered. The stone at its center glowed with the life force of Tevash Szat. Urza kicked clean the edge of the pit. A few blasts of the ray cannons on his hand vaporized the oil. Pivoting the spikes from the side of the device, Urza pressed it into the ground. The spikes sank away and clamped on. It would take a hundred Phyrexians a whole week to dig it out. By then, there would be no Phyrexians left at all.

What am I doing? Urza wondered suddenly, staring at the sun-bright blaze before him. Why am I destroying this masterpiece? His metallic digits turned the top of the soul bomb, setting the charge. Now the device would be triggered with all the rest. Nothing could disarm it, not even Urza Planeswalker.

The sound of distant battle came to his ears. The others must have been fending off an attack. They had slain the Steam Beast. Perhaps now they fought the Walker. They acted like big game hunters gathering trophies.

Urza's titan engine rose from its knees. Glass and oil dripped from him. He turned on his own path-"repented" was the word the ancients would have used. There before him, he saw his trail of destruction. While vats glowed in a golden garden all around, where he had walked was only ruin.

It wasn't too late to end this destruction. It wasn't too late to join the quest for perfection.