Planeswalker

CHAPTER 11

The supplies were stowed, safe against mist, mice, and anything else the changeable climate of Ohran Ridge might drop on the cottage. Xantcha had checked them twice during the interminable night. She'd made herself a pot of tea and drunk it all. The herbs should have helped her relax, but

they hadn't. Dawn's golden light fell sideways on the bed where she hadn't slept.

Her door was wide open, inviting shadows. Urza's wasn't. It wasn't warded with layers of "leave me alone" sorcery, but it wasn't leaking sound. The sounds had stopped coming through the wall in the unmeasured hours after midnight. Ratepe, Xantcha had told herself, had probably fallen asleep, and Urza rarely made noise when he was alone. Nothing unusual. Nothing to worry about. So why had she opened her door? Why had she spent the last of the night damp and shivering? Hadn't Ratepe demonstrated, if not an ability to take care of himself, then an inclination to ignore her advice?

And hadn't Urza welcomed Ratepe more enthusiastically than she'd dare hope? Whatever had brought silence to the far side of the wall, it wouldn't have been murder. No matter how annoying Ratepe got, he'd survive.

Xantcha unwound her blankets. Her joints creaked. Phyrexia was easier on flesh and bone than the Ohran Ridge. She broke the ice in her washstand, cleared her head with a few breathtaking splashes, then went outside and listened at the door. She'd give them until midday. If Ratepe hadn't reappeared by then, Xantcha planned to take a chisel to the cottage's common wall. Before that, she had one more gambit to try and put her chisel to work on the hardened ashes underneath her outdoor hearth.

When the fire was just right Xantcha covered it with an iron grate and covered the grate with a rasher of bacon. A friendly breeze carried the aromas into the cottage. She never knew when or if Urza would be in a mood to eat, but if Ratepe was alive, he'd be out the door before the bacon burnt.

Right on schedule Ratepe appeared in the doorway. "By the book! That smells good." He didn't have the cross- grained look of a man who'd just awakened, and he said something-Xantcha couldn't hear what-over his shoulder before closing the door behind him. "I'm starving."

"I see you survived." Xantcha hadn't realized how angry she was until she heard her own voice. "Here, eat. Starting tomorrow, you can cook your own." On his own hearth, too. Xantcha wasn't sharing, at least not until she'd calmed down.

Ratepe had the sense to approach her cautiously. "You're angry about last night?"

Xantcha slammed hot, crisp bacon on a wooden platter and thrust it at him. She didn't know why she was so upset and didn't want to discuss the matter.

"I guess it got out of hand. When I saw him-Urza. He is Urza, the Urza, Urza the Artificer. You were right, you know. Back in Efuan Pincar, I didn't believe you. I thought maybe you thought he was Urza, but I didn't think he could be the Urza, the by-the-holy-book Artificer!" Ratepe paused long enough to inhale a piece of bacon. "I thought I'd been as scared as I could get before I met you, but that was before he touched me. Avohir! I swear I'll never be afraid again."

"Don't make promises you can't keep."

"There can't be anything scarier." Ratepe shook his head and shoved another piece into his mouth.

This time he chewed before he swallowed. She was about

to criticize his manners, but he was too fast for her.

"He's Urza. Urza is Urza, the real Urza. And I'm Mishra. I'm talking to a legend, watching things, hearing things I can't imagine, because Urza-Urza the Artificer, straight out of The Antiquity Wars, thinks I'm his brother, Mishra the Mighty, Mishra the Destroyer, and we're going to put what's wrong back to rights again."

Another pause. More bacon, more bad manners, but then he hadn't had manners before. His face was flushed and his eyes never stopped moving.

"I'm Mishra. Avohir! I'm Mishra.... He tries to trick me sometimes, says things he doesn't believe, things I shouldn't believe. I have to watch him close ... watch him close. Did you see his eyes, Xantcha? Avohir! I think he's a little touched? But I stay ahead of him, nearly. I have to. I'm almighty Mishra-"

Xantcha had had enough of Ratepe's babbling. She wasn't as fast as Urza, but she was fast enough to seize a would- be Mishra by the neck of his tunic and whirl him against the nearest post. Damp debris from the thatching rained down on them both.

"You are not Mishra, you merely pretend to be Mishra. You are Ratepe, son of Mideah, and the day you forget that will be the day you die, because he is Urza and you cannot hope to 'stay ahead of him.' Do you understand?"

When a wide-eyed Ratepe didn't immediately say yes, Xantcha rattled his spine against the post. His chin bobbed vigorously. She released his tunic and stepped back. The greater part of her anger was gone.

"I know who I am, Xantcha," Ratepe insisted, sounding more like himself, more like the youth Xantcha thought she knew. "I'm Rat, just Rat. But if I don't forget, just a little-when he looks at me, Xantcha-when Urza the Artificer looks at me, if I don't let myself believe I am who he thinks I am-who you told me to be- then ..." He stared at the closed door. "When I saw his eyes. I never believed that part, Xantcha. It's not in The Antiquity Wars.

Kayla wrote about Tawnos coming to tell her about how he'd seen Urza with the Weakstone and Mightstone embedded in his skull. She thought it was all lies, nice lies because Tawnos didn't want her to know the truth. The idea that the Weakstone or the Might-stone kept Urza alive, that's not even in Jarsyl. There's only one source for the stuff about Urza's eyes glowing with all the power of the sylex: four scraps of parchment bound by mistake at the back of the T'mill codex. They're supposed to be Tawnos's deathbed confession. My father said it was pure apocrypha. But it wasn't! Urza's eyes, they are the Weakstone and the Mightstone, aren't they? They're what've kept him alive, if Urza really is alive, if he's not just something the stones have created."

Waste not, want not, Xantcha hadn't found Mishra the Destroyer, she'd found Mishra the skeptic and Mishra the babbling pedant! She shot him a disbelieving look. "Don't ask me. Last night, you were the one who said that the Weakstone was singing to you."

Ratepe winced and walked past the bacon without taking any.

"Two eyes, two stones," Xantcha continued. "I thought you'd gotten lucky."

"I heard something, not with my ears, but inside my head." He stopped and faced her, confusion painfully evident on his face. "I called it singing, 'cause that's the best word I had. And it came from his left eye." He sat down on the ash bucket, staring at his feet. "Do you want to know how I knew which eye was which?"

Measured by his expression, she wouldn't like the answer but, "Go ahead, enlighten me."

"It told me. It told me what it was and that it had been waiting for someone who could hear it. When Urza said Harbin wasn't his son, it was, it was .. ," Ratepe made a helpless gesture that ended with his fingertips pressed against his temples. "Not pain, but like the feeling that comes after pain." He stopped again and closed his eyes before continuing. "Xantcha, I heard Mishra. Well, not quite heard him. It was just there, in my mind, from the stone. I knew what Mishra thought, what he would have said. Not his words, exactly. My words." His eyes opened. He stared at Xantcha with only a shadow of his usual cockiness. "I know who I am, Xantcha.

I'm Ratepe, son of Mideah, or, just Rat now, 'cause I lost everything when I became a slave. I was born almost eighteen years ago in the city of Pincar, on the sixth day after the Festival of Fruits in the sixth year of Tabarna's reign. I'm me. But, Xantcha, pretending to be Mishra, the way you asked me to-" He broke the stare. "It's not pretend. I could get lost. I could wind up thinking I am Mishra before this is over."

Xantcha bit her lip and sighed. Ratepe wasn't looking, didn't seem to have heard. "Right now, while you're sitting there, can you hear the Weakstone singing Mishra's thoughts in your mind?"

He shook his head. "Only when I'm looking at Urza's eyes, or when he's looking at me."

She began another sigh, of relief this time, but she began too soon.

"I'm worried, Xantcha. It's so real, so easy to imagine him, and that's after just one night. By next year when I'm supposed to go back to Efuan Pincar ... ? You should've warned me."

Trust Rat-or Ratepe-or Mishra-or whatever he wanted to call himself to go for the guilt. "I didn't know about the singing. I knew about Urza's eyes, where they came from anyway, and I did warn you about that. But singing and Mishra? Beyond The Antiquity Wars, I don't know anything but what Urza's told me, and I guess there's a lot he didn't."

The rest of Xantcha's anger went with that admission. She leaned against a porch post, grateful that no one was looking at her. All those times Urza had glowered at her, eyes ablaze-had the voice of Mishra's Weakstone tried to make itself heard in her mind? Why, really, had she gone in search of a false Mishra? What had drawn her to Ratepe? She'd known he was the one to fulfill her plans before she'd gotten a good look at him.

"Can I trust myself?"

Xantcha had no assurances, not for herself or for him. "I don't know."

Ratepe folded his arms tightly across his ribs and shrank within himself. Xantcha had spent all her life with

Phyrexians or Urza. She wasn't accustomed to expressive faces and wasn't prepared for the gust of empathy that blew from Ratepe to her. She tried to shake it off with a change of subject and a touch of humor.

"What were the three of you talking about all night?"

Ratepe wasn't interested. "A year from now, will there be anything left of me? Will I be myself?"

"I'm still me," Xantcha answered.

"Right. We talked, some, about you."

She should have expected that, but hadn't. "I haven't lied to you, Ratepe, not about the important things. The Phyrexians are real, and Urza's the only one with the power to defeat them."

"But Urza's wits are addled, aren't they? And you thought you'd cure him if you scrounged up someone who'd remind him of his brother. You thought you could make him stop living in the past."

"I told you that before we left Medran."

"Are you as old as he is?"

Xantcha found the question surprisingly difficult to answer. "Younger, a bit... I think. You're not the only one who doesn't know who or what to trust inside. He told you I was Phyrexian?"

"Repeatedly. But, since he thinks I'm Mishra, he's not infallible."

The bacon was burning. Xantcha scraped the charred rashers onto the platter and made of show of eating one, swallowing time while she decided how to answer.

"You can believe him." She took a deep breath and recited-in Phyrexian squeals, squeaks, and chattering, as best she could remember them-the first lesson she'd learned from the vat-priests. "Newts you are, and newts you shall remain. Obey and learn. Pay attention. Make no mistakes."

Ratepe gaped. "That day, in the sphere, when you cut yourself-If I'd taken the knife from you-"

"I'd bleed no matter where you cut me. It would have hurt. You could have killed me, you were inside the sphere. I'm not Urza. I don't think Urza can be killed. I don't think he's alive, not the way you and I are."

"You and I, Xantcha? No one I know lives for three thousand years."

"Closer to thirty-four hundred, I think. Urza believes I was born on another plane and that the Phyrexians stole me while I was still a child then compleated me the way they compleated Mishra.

But that can't be true. I don't know what happened to Mishra, but with newts, we've got to be compleated while we're still new. Urza's never accepted that I was dragged out of a vat in the Fane of Flesh."

"So, in addition to everything else, Phyrexians are immortal?"

"To survive the compleation, newts have to be very resilient, immortally resilient. But Phyrexians can die, especially newts, just not of age or anything else that born-folk might call natural."

"And after thirty-four hundred years, Urza still doesn't believe you?"

"Urza's mad, Ratepe. What he knows and what he believes aren't always the same. Most of the time it doesn't make any difference, as long as he acts to defeat Phyrexia and

stops trying to recreate the past on a tabletop."

Ratepe nodded. "He showed me what he was working on."

"Again?" Xantcha couldn't muster surprise or indignation, only weariness.

"I guess, if you say so. Funny thing, with the Weakstone, I get a sense of everything that happened to Mishra." He fell silent until Xantcha looked at him. "You're half-right about what happened. Urza's half-right, too. Phyrexians wanted the Weakstone. When Mishra wouldn't surrender it, one of them tried to kill him. The Weakstone kept him alive then and even when they took him apart later, but it couldn't keep him sane." Ratepe strangled a laugh. "Maybe burning his own mind was the last sane thing Mishra did. After that, there're only images, like paintings on a wall, and waiting, endless waiting, for Urza to listen."

"And now Mishra, or the Weakstone, or both of them together have you to speak for them."

"So far, I listen, but I speak for myself."

"What does that mean?"

Ratepe began to pace. He made a fist with his right hand and pounded it against his left palm. "It means I'd do anything to have my life back. I wish I'd never seen you. I wish I was still a slave in Medran. Tucktah and Garve only had my body. My thoughts were safe. I didn't know the meaning of powerless until I looked into Urza's eyes. I'm as dead as he is, as Mishra, as you."

The self-proclaimed dead man stopped beside the bacon platter and ate a rasher.

"I'm not dead."

"No, you're Phyrexian," Ratepe retorted between swallows. "You weren't born, you were immortal when you were decanted. How could you ever be dead?"

Xantcha ignored the question. "A year, Ratepe, or less. As soon as Urza turns away from the past, I'll take you back to Efuan Pincar. You have my word for that."

Silence, then: "Urza doesn't trust you."

That stung, even if Ratepe was only repeating something that Xantcha had heard countless times before. "I would never betray him... or you."

"But you're Phyrexian. If I believe you, you've never been anything but Phyrexian. They're your kin. My father once told me not to trust a man who led a fight against his kin. Betrayal is a nasty habit that once acquired is never cast aside."

"Your father is dead." When it came to cruelty, Xantcha had been taught by masters.

Ratepe stiffened. Leaving the last rashers of bacon on the platter, he walked a straight path away from the cottage. Xantcha let him go. She banked the fire, ate the last of the soggy bacon, and retreated to her room. Her treasured copies of The Antiquity Wars offered no solace, not against the turmoil she'd invited into her life when she'd bought herself a slave. And though there was no chance that she'd fall asleep, Xantcha threw herself down on her mattress and pillows.

She was still there, weary, lost in time, and wallowing in an endless array of painful memories, when she sensed a darkening and heard a gentle tapping on her open door. "Are you awake?"

If Xantcha hadn't been awake, she wouldn't have heard Ratepe's question. If she'd had her wits, she could have answered him with unmoving silence and he might have gone away. But Xantcha couldn't remember the last time anyone had knocked on her door. Sheer surprise lifted her onto her elbows, revealing her secret before she had a chance to keep it.

Ratepe crossed her threshold and settled himself at her table, on her stool. There was only one in the room. Xantcha sat up on the mattress, not entirely pleased with the situation. Ratepe stiffened. He seemed to reconsider his visit, but spoke softly instead.

"I'm sorry. I'm angry and I'm scared and just plain stupid. You're the closest I've got to a friend right now. I shouldn't've said what I said. I'm sorry." He held out his hand.

Xantcha knew the signal. It was oddly consistent across the planes where men and women abounded. Smile if you're happy, frown when you're not. Make a fist when you're angry, but offer your open hand for trust. It was as if men and women were born knowing the same gestures.

She kept her hands wrapped around her pillow. "Betrayed by the truth?"

He winced and lowered his hand. "Not the truth. Just words I knew would hurt. You did it, too. Call it square?"

"Why not?"

Xantcha offered her hand which Ratepe seized and shook vigorously, then released as if he was glad to have the ritual behind him. A suspicion he confirmed with his next remark.

"Urza's gone. I knocked on his door. I thought I'd talk to him and ask his advice. I know, that was stupid, too. But, the door opened... and he's not in there."

Xantcha spun herself off the bed and toward the door. "He's gone "walking."

"I didn't see him leave, Xantcha, and I would've. I didn't go far, not out of sight. He's vanished."

"Planeswalking," she explained, leading the way to the porch and the door to Urza's larger quarters. "Dominaria's a plane, Moag, Vatraquaz, Equilor, Serra's realm, even Phyrexia, they're all planes, all worlds, and Urza can 'walk among them. Don't ask how. I don't know. I just close my eyes and die a little every time. The sphere that I brought you here in started off as armor, so I could survive when he pulled me after him."

"But? You're Phyrexian. The Phyrexians ... how do they get here?"

"Ambulators ... artifacts."

Xantcha put her weight against the door and shoved it open. Not a moment's doubt that Urza was gone, but one of surprise when she saw that the table was clear.

"You said you saw him working at the table?" Ratepe barreled into her, keeping his balance only by grabbing her shoulders. He let go quickly, as he had when their hands had touched. "It was a battlefield, "The Dawn of Fire." Can you tell where he's gone?"

Xantcha shrugged and hurried to the table. No dust, no silver droplets, no gnats stuck in the wood grain or stranded on the floor. She tried to remember another time when Urza had cleaned up after himself so thoroughly. She

couldn't. "Phyrexia?" Ratepe asked, at her side again. "He wasn't ready for a battle, and there'll be a battle, if he ever goes back to Phyrexia. No, I think he's still here, somewhere on Dominaria."

"But you said 'among worlds.' "

"The fastest way from here and there on Dominaria is to go between-worlds. Did he mention Baszerat or Morvern?"

Ratepe made a sour face. "No. Why would anyone mention Baszerat and Morvern?"

"Because the Phyrexians are there, on both sides of a war. I told him to go and see for himself. With all the excitement last night, I forgot to ask him what he learned."

"That the Baszerati are swine and the Morvernish are sheep?" After so many worlds and so many years of wandering, Xantcha tended to see similarities. Ratepe had a one-worlder's perspective, which she tried to change. "They are equally besieged, equally vulnerable. The Phyrexians are the enemy; nothing else matters. It was smelling them in Baszerat and Morvern that convinced me the time was right to go looking for you. Urza's got to hold the line in Baszerat and Morvern or it will be too late."

Ratepe sulked. "Why not hold the line in Efuan Pincar? The Phyrexians are there, too, aren't they?"

"I haven't talked to him about Efuan Pincar."

"I did." He saw her gasp and added, "You didn't say I shouldn't."

When Xantcha had hatched her scheme to end Urza's madness by bringing him face-to-face with his brother, she'd imagined that she'd be setting the pace, planning the strategies until Urza's wits were sharp again. Her plans had been going awry almost from the beginning, certainly since the burning village. While she came to terms with her error, Ratepe attacked the silence.

"He didn't seem to know our history, so I tried to tell him everything from the Landings on. He seemed interested. He asked questions and I answered them. He seemed surprised that I could, because he said my mind was empty. But he paid the closest attention toward the end when I told him about the Shratta and the Red-Stripes. Especially the Shratta and Avohir and our holy book. I told him our family wasn't religious, that if he really wanted to know, he should visit the temples of Pincar and listen to the priests. There are still wise priests in Pincar, I think. The Shratta can't have gotten them all."

"Enough, Ratepe," Xantcha said with a sigh and a finger laid on Ratepe's upper lip. He flinched again. They both took a step back. The increased distance made conversation a little easier; eye contact, too, if he'd been willing to look at her. "It's not your fault."

"I shouldn't have told him about the temples?"

Xantcha raised her eyebrows.

Ratepe corrected himself. "I shouldn't have told him about the Phyrexians. I should have asked you first?"

"And I would have told you to wait, even though there's nothing I want more than to get Urza moving. You did what you thought was right, and it was right. It's not what I would have done. I've got to get used to that. I warn you, it won't be easy."

"He'll come back, won't he? Urza won't just roar

through Efuan Pincar, killing every Red-Stripe Phyrexian he can find."

With a last look at the table, Xantcha headed out. "There's no second guessing Urza the Artificer, Ratepe-but if he did, it wouldn't be a bad thing, would it?"

"Killing all the Red-Stripes would leave the Shratta without any enemies."

Xantcha paused beside the door. "You're assuming that there aren't any Phyrexians among the Shratta. Remember what I told you about the Baszerati and the Morvernish-the sheep and the swine? I wouldn't count on it."

She left Ratepe standing in the empty room and had gotten as far as the wellhead, beyond the hearth, before he came chasing after her.

"What do we do now?" Ratepe's cheeks were red above the dark stubble of a two-day beard. "Follow him?"

"We wait." Xantcha unknotted the winch and let the bucket drop.

"Something could go wrong."

"All the more reason to wait." She began cranking. "We'd only make it worse."

"Una hadn't ever heard of Efuan Pincar. He didn't know where it was. He doesn't know our language."

Xantcha let go of the winch. "What language do you think you two have been speaking since you got here?" Ratepe's mouth fell open, but no sound came out, so she went on. "I don't know why he says our minds are empty. He's willing to plunder them when it suits him. Urza doesn't know everything you know. You can keep a secret by just not thinking about it, or by imagining a wall around it, but in the beginning-and maybe all the time-best think that Urza knows what you know."

Ratepe stood motionless except for his breathing, which was shallow with shock. His flush had faded to waxy pale. Xantcha cranked the bucket up and offered him sweet water from the ladle. Most of it went down his chin, but he found his voice.

"He knows what I was thinking? The Weakstone and Mishra? How I thought I was outwitting Urza the Artificer? Avohir's mercy ..."

Xantcha refilled the ladle and drank. "Maybe. Urza's mad, Ratepe, He hears what he wants to hear, whether it's your voice or your thoughts, and he might not hear you at all-but he could. That's what you've got to remember. I should've told you sooner." "Do you know what I'm thinking?" "Only when your mouth is open."

He closed it immediately, and Xantcha walked away, chuckling. She'd gone about ten steps when Ratepe raced past and stopped, facing her.

"All right. I've had enough ... You're Phyrexian. You weren't born, you crawled out of a pit. You're more than three thousand years old, even though you look about twelve. You dress like a man-a boy. You talk like a man, but Efuand's a tricky language. We talk about things as if they were men or women-a dog is a man, but a cat is a lady. Among ourselves, though, when you say 'I did this,' or 'I did that,' the form's the same, whether I'm a man or woman. Usually, the difference is obvious." He swallowed hard, and Xantcha knew what he was thinking before he opened his mouth again. "Last night, Urza, when he'd talk about you,

he'd say she and her. What are you, Xantcha, a man or a

woman?"

"Is it important?"

"Yes, it's important."

"Neither."

She walked past him and didn't break his arm when he spun her back to face him.

"That's not an answer!"

"It's not the answer you want." She wrenched free.

"But, Urza ... ? Why?"

"Phyrexian's not a tricky language. There are no families, no need for men or women, no words for them, either-except in dreams. I had no need for those words until I met a demon. He invaded my mind. After that and because of it, I've thought of myself as she."

"Urza?" Ratepe's voice had harshened. He was indignant, angry.

Xantcha laughed. "No, not Urza. Long before Urza."

"So, you and Urza ... ?"

"Urza? You did read The Antiquity Wars, didn't you? Urza didn't even notice Kayla Bin-Kroog!"

She left Ratepe gaping and closed the door behind her.