Planeswalker

CHAPTER 12

Urza was an honorable man, and an honest one. Even when he'd been an ordinary man, if the word ordinary had ever applied to Urza the Artificer, Urza had had no great use for romance or affection, but he'd tolerated friendship, one friend at a time.

After Xantcha had pushed him out of Phyrexia, he'd accepted her as a friend.

In the three thousand years since, Xantcha had never asked for more nor settled for less.

They'd stumbled through three worlds before the day during which Urza had ridden his dragon into Phyrexia, ended. Xantcha was seedier than Urza by then, which meant they were leaning against each other when Xantcha released her armor to the cool, night mist. There were unfamiliar stars peeking through the mist and a trio of blue-white moons.

"Far enough," she whispered. Her voice had been wrecked by the bad air of four different worlds. "I've got to rest."

"It's not safe! I hear him, Yawg-"

Xantcha cringed whenever Urza started to say that word. She seized the crumbling substance of his ornately armored tunic. "You're calling the Ineffable! Never say that, never do that. Every time you say that name, the Ineffable can hear you. Of all the things I was taught in the Fane of Flesh, that one I believe with all my strength. We'll never be safe until you burn that name from your memory."

Sparks danced across Una's eyes, which had been a featureless black since he'd dragged them away from Phyrexia. Xantcha didn't know what he saw, except it had him spooked, and anything that unnerved Urza was more than enough for her.

Urza took her suggestion to heart. Heat radiated from his face. Waste not, want not, if he could literally burn something from his memory, he could probably survive it, too. Still, she put more distance between them, leading him by the wrist to a rock where he could sit.

"Water, Xantcha. Could you bring me water?"

He was blind, at least to real things. His vision, he'd said, was all spots and bubbles, as if he'd stared too long at the sun. There'd been no sun above the Fourth Sphere, but the dragon had been the target of all the weapons, sorcerous and elemental, that the demons could aim.

"You'll stay right here?" she asked.

"I'll try."

Xantcha didn't ask what he meant. She'd set her feet on enough worlds to have a sharp sense of where she could survive and where she couldn't. Phyrexia and the three worlds after Phyrexia were inhospitable, but this three- moon world was viable. She had her cyst, her heart, and, tucked inside her tunic, an ambulator. If Urza vanished before she returned, it wouldn't be the end of her.

Heavy rains had fallen recently. Xantcha saw water at the base of the hill where they emerged from between- worlds. Carrying it was another matter. She quenched her thirst from her own cupped hands, but for Urza she stripped off her tunic, sopped it in the water, and carried it, dripping, up the hill.

Urza's attempt to remain seated atop the rock had been successful. Silhouetted against the softly lit night sky, his shoulders were slumped forward, and his chin had disappeared in the shadows of his armored tunic. His hands lay inert in his lap.

"Urza?"

His chin rose.

"I've brought you water, without grace or dignity."

"As long as it is wet."

She guided his hand to the sopping cloth. "Quite wet."

Urza sucked moisture from the cloth, then wiped his face. When he'd finished, he let her tunic fall. Xantcha sat at his feet.

"Is there anything more I can do for you? Will you eat? Food might help. I smell berries. It's summer here."

He shook his head. "Just sit beside me. Sleep, if you can, child. Morning will come, a summer morning."

Xantcha fought into her tunic. The night was cool, not cold. The garment was uncomfortable, nothing worse. Discomfort was nothing unfamiliar. She got comfortable against the rock. Urza shifted his hand to the top of her head.

"I told you to stay behind."

"I did, for a little while."

"You could have been hurt. I might have left you in Phyrexia forever."

Urza was Urza, at the very center of his world and every other. On a night like this, after the day they'd survived, his vainglory was reassuring. Xantcha relaxed.

"It went otherwise, Urza. I was neither hurt nor left behind."

"I'd still be there but for you."

"You'd be dead, Urza, if you can die, or in the Seventh Sphere, if you can't, wishing that you could."

"The Seventh Sphere is the place where-" He hesitated. "Where the Ineffable punishes demons?"

"Yes."

"Then I should thank you."

"Yes," Xantcha repeated. "And you should have listened to me when I told you what waited in Phyrexia."

"I will build another dragon, bigger and stronger. I know where

Phyrexia is now, tucked across a fathomless chasm. I would never have seen it 'walking. I wouldn't see it now, but I know and I can go back. They will die, Xantcha. I will reap them like a field of overripe grain. The day of Mishra's vengeance is closer today than yesterday."

Xantcha swallowed an ordinary yawn. "You were surrounded, Urza. The fourth leg went right after I climbed it. You'd destroyed hundreds of Phyrexians, and yet there were as many around you at the end as there had been at the beginning."

"I will change my design."

"A thousand legs wouldn't be enough. You can't destroy every Phyrexian by fighting. You'll need allies and an army three times the size of Phyrexia. Tactics. Strategy." Xantcha thought of the heart vault. "Or, the perfect target for a stealthy attack."

"And since when did you become my war consul, child?"

Urza could be disdainful. Strategy and tactics indeed. She'd need be careful when she mentioned the heart vault. Tonight, while Urza was blind and she was exhausted, wasn't the right time to reveal her discoveries. Another yawn escaped, entirely normal. Without the mnemonic, the cyst was just a lump in her stomach.

"Sleep, child. I am grateful. I underestimated my enemy. I'll never do that again."

Xantcha was too tired to celebrate what little victory she'd achieved. She fell asleep thinking she'd be alone when she awoke.

She was, but Urza hadn't gone far. With nothing more than grass, twigs and small stones, Xantcha's companion had recreated the Fourth Sphere battleground in an area no more than two-paces square. His dragon, made from twigs and woven grass, towered over the other replicas in precisely the proportions she remembered. She expected it to move.

"I'm awed," she admitted before her shadow fell across Urza's small wonders. "You must be feeling better?"

"As good as a fool can feel."

It was a comment that begged questions, but Xantcha had learned to tread softly through confusion. "You can see again?"

"Yes, yes." He looked up: black pupils, hazel irises, white sclera. "You had the right of it, Xantcha. Burn that name out of my mind.

As soon as I did, I began to feel like myself again, ignorant and foolish. No one was hurt. No planes were damaged."

"A few spheres. The priests will be a long time repairing the damage. And you destroyed a score of their dragons and wyverns. Better than I expected, honestly."

"But not good enough. If I'd come down here-" Urza touched the ground behind the stone-shaped furnaces then quickly rearranged the delicate figures-"I'd have had a

wall of fire at my back, and they couldn't have encircled me."

Xantcha studied the new array. "How would that be better? With the furnaces behind you, you'd have been held in one place almost from the start." Urza gave her a look that sparkled. She changed the subject. "Are we staying here while you build another dragon?"

"No. The multiverse is real, Xantcha. At least every plane I'd ever found before was real, until yesterday when I found Phyrexia. Going there and leaving, those were 'walking strides like I've never taken before. It was as if I'd leapt a vast chasm in a single bound. The chasm, I realize now, is everywhere, and Phyrexia is its far side. No matter where we are, we're only one leap away from our enemy and it from us. Even so, I'll feel better when I've put a few knots in my trail."

She had no argument with that plan. "Then what? Another dragon? An army? Allies? I found something yesterday, Urza, something I thought was probably lies. I found my heart."

Xantcha slid her hand into her boot. The amber continued to glow. She offered it to Urza.

"That is-well, it's not your heart, Xantcha." He didn't take it. "Your heart beats behind your ribs, child. The Phyrexians lied to you. They took your past and your future, but they didn't take your heart." Urza guided her empty hand to her breastbone. "There, can you feel it?"

She nodded. All flesh had a blood-heart in its breast. Newts in the Fane of Flesh had hearts until they were compleated. "This is different," she insisted and described the vault where countless hearts shimmered. "We are connected to our hearts. We are taught that the Ineffable keeps watch over our hearts and records our errors on their surface. Too many errors and-" She drew a line across her throat.

Urza took the amber and held it to the sun. Xantcha couldn't see his face or his eyes but a strangeness not unlike the between-worlds tightened around her. She couldn't breathe, couldn't even muster the strength or will to gasp until Urza lowered his hand. His face, when he turned toward her again, was not pleased.

"Of all abominations, this is the greatest." Urza held the amber above her still-outstretched hand but did not release it. "I would not call it a heart, yet it falls short of a powerstone. I can imagine no purpose for it, except the one you describe. And you knew where the vault was?"

Xantcha sensed Urza had asked a critical question and that her life might depend on her answer. She would have lied, if she'd been certain a lie would satisfy him. "I knew it was somewhere in the Fane of Flesh."

"You didn't tell me?"

"I didn't want to die with all the rest of Phyrexia. I wasn't certain. I thought you'd laugh and call me a child again, and I would have been too ashamed to follow you."

Not quite an answer, but the truth and, apparently, satisfactory. Urza dropped the amber into her hand. Without conscious thought, Xantcha clutched it against her blood- heart.

"I wouldn't have-" Urza began, then stopped abruptly and looked down at his grass-and-twig dragon. "No, very

possibly your concerns were justified. I do not imagine abominations and have discouraged you, thinking you imagined them. I allowed myself to forget that your mind is empty. Phyrexians have no imagination." He crushed the dragon beneath his boot. "Another mistake. Another error. Forgive me, Mishra, I cannot see when I need most to see and opportunity slips away forever. If only I could relive yesterday instead of tomorrow."

"You can go back as soon as you've restored your strength. If I could find the vault..."

Urza shuddered. "They know me now. Your Ineffable knows me, I cannot return to Phyrexia, not without absolute certainty of success and overwhelming strength. For the sake of vengeance, I must be cautious. I cannot make any more mistakes. I would be found out before I set foot on your First Sphere."

Xantcha kept her mouth shut. It wasn't her First Sphere. Urza had powers that Phyrexia coveted, but he was oddly reluctant to use them. He had to overwhelm whatever lay before him, and when he made one of his mistakes, that mistake became a fortress.

"I could go. I have an ambulator." She lifted the hem of her tunic, revealing the small black disk tucked beneath her belt. "If you made a smaller dragon, I could turn it loose in the vault."

Urza smiled. "Your courage is laudable, child, but you couldn't hope to succeed. We will talk no more about it." He reached for the portal. Xantcha retreated, folding her arms defensively over her belly. "Come child, you have no need for such an artifact. It is beyond your understanding. Let me have it."

"I'm not a child," she warned, the least incendiary comment seething on the back of her tongue.

"You see, simply having a Phyrexian artifact so close to you taints you, as that name, yesterday, threatened to taint me. You haven't the strength to resist its corruption. You've become willful. Between that and your heart ... You're overwhelmed, Xantcha. I should take them both from you, for your own safety, but I will leave you your heart, if you give me the ambulator."

"It's mine!" Xantcha protested. "I rolled it up."

She'd seen born-children in her travels and recognized her behavior. Urza didn't have to say another word. Xantcha handed the ambulator over.

"Thank you, Xantcha. I will study it closely."

Urza held the ambulator between his fingertips where it vanished. Perhaps he would study it. Perhaps he would find a way to add its properties to her cyst. Whichever or whatever, Xantcha didn't think she'd see it again, but she kept her heart. Urza could have everything else, not that.

He 'walked through two more worlds that day and two more the next and the next after that, making knots in their trail. After two score worlds in half as many days, Xantcha swore the next would be her last, that she'd let go of his hands and remain behind. Any world would be better than another between-worlds passage. But the next world was yellow gas, wind, and lightning that seemed particularly attracted to her armor, and the world after that had no air. Urza made an underground chamber where Xantcha could breathe without her armor and catch up on her sleep.

They came to a swamp with cone-shaped insects as long as her forearm and an abundance of frogs, not Xantcha's favorite sort of place. It reminded her of Phyrexia's First Sphere, but she could breathe and eat and the water, though brackish, didn't make her sick.

"This is far enough for me," she announced when Urza held out his hand. "I don't need to visit every world."

"Only a few more," Urza protested.

He'd begun to pace. Since Phyrexia, his restlessness had steadily worsened until he could scarcely stand still. He didn't even try to sleep.

"I'm tired," she told him.

"You slept last night."

"Last night! When was last night? Where was last night? The world with the yellow trees or the one with two suns? I want to stay put long enough see the seasons change."

"Farmer," Urza chided her, a distinct improvement over 'child' and the truth as well. She'd spent too much time scratching in Phyrexia's sterile soil not to appreciate worlds where plants grew naturally.

"I want a home."

"So do I." An admission she hadn't expected. "It's here, Xantcha. Dominaria ... home. I can feel it each time we 'walk, but at every step, a darkness blocks me. The darkness was here the last time, before I found you. It was like nothing I'd encountered before. I was sure it would pass, but it hasn't. It's still here, and stronger than before."

"Like a knife?" she asked, remembering the rumors of newts trapped on the nether side of broken portals.

"A knife? No, it is as if multiverse itself had shattered, as if Dominaria and all the planes that are bound to it have been broken apart. I have 'walked all around, approaching it from every vantage, yet each time it is the same. There is a darkness that is also cold and repels me. I've been making a map in my mind, a shape beyond words. When it's done, I will know that Dominaria is completely sealed from me and Phyrexia.

"It is my fault, you know. It's not merely vengeance that I require from Phyrexia. I require atonement The Phyrexians corrupted and destroyed my brother; that's vengeance. But we, my brother and I, let them back into Dominaria when we destroyed the Thran safeguards. The land itself has not forgiven me, won't forgive me until I have atoned for our error by destroying Phyrexia. Dominaria locks me out, as it locks out the Phyrexians. I cannot go home until I have done what not even the Thran could do: destroy Phyrexia!

"I want to go home, Xantcha. You, who cannot remember where you were born, cannot know true homesickness as I know it. I had not thought it would be so difficult. The land does not forgive. It has sealed itself against me. But it has sealed itself against Phyrexia, too, and though my heart aches, I am content with my exile, knowing that my home is safe."

Xantcha rubbed her temples. There was truth, usually, tangled through Urza's self-centered delusions. "Searcherpriests don't "walk between-worlds," she said cautiously, when she thought she had the wheat separated from the chaff. When conversation touched Mishra, Dominaria or the

mysterious Thran, Urza's moods became less predictable than they usually were. "They use ambulators, but I don't know how they set the stones to find new worlds. Maybe you can't be quite certain that Dominaria is safe?"

"I'm certain," he insisted.

Her thoughts raced along a bright tangent. "You figured out how to set the stones on my ambulator?"

"Yes. I set it for Dominaria, and it was destroyed."

Xantcha's mind went dark. There was much she could have said and no reason to say any of it. She turned away with a sigh.

"When I know, beyond doubt, that Dominaria is inaccessible, then I will look for a hospitable plane. I mean to take your advice, Xantcha. I will build an army three times the size of Phyrexia, and ambulators large enough to transport them by the thousand! I examined your ambulator quite thoroughly before it was destroyed. I can make you another once I find the right materials, and can make it better."

Urza expected her to rejoice, so she tried. She took his arm and followed to a "few" more worlds, thirty-three, before he was satisfied that Dominaria was inaccessible behind what he called a shard of the multiverse. Urza insisted that, compared to the mul-tiverse, a thousand worlds could be properly termed a "few" worlds. The multiverse meant little to her. Urza's efforts to explain the planes and nexi that comprised it meant less. But the fact that Urza did try to explain it meant a lot.

"I need a friend," he explained one lonely night on a world where the air was old and nothing remained alive. "I need to talk with someone who has seen what I have seen, some of it, enough to listen without going numb from despair. And, after I have talked, I need to hear a voice that is not my own."

"But you never listen to me!"

"I always listen, Xantcha. You are rarely correct. I cannot replace what the Phyrexians took away from you. Your mind is mostly empty, and what isn't empty is filled with Phyrexian rubbish. You recite their lies because you cannot know better. Your advice, child, is untrustworthy, but you, yourself, are my friend."

Urza hadn't called her child since they "walked away from Dominaria, and Xantcha didn't like to think that after so much time together, he continued to distrust her, but an offer of friendship, true friendship, was a gift not to be overlooked.

"I will never betray you," Xantcha said softly, taking his hand between hers.

It was like stone at first, flexible stone. Then it softened, warmed, and became flesh.

"I want nothing more than to be your friend, Urza."

He smiled, a rare and mortal gesture. "I will take you wherever you want, but I would rather you wanted to remain with me until we find a plane that satisfies both of us."

Late that night, when the fire was cold and Urza had gone wandering, as he usually did while she slept, Xantcha sharpened her knife and made an incision in her left flank, the side opposite the cyst. She tucked her amber heart into the gap, sealed it with a paste of ashes, then bound it tightly with cloth torn from her spare clothes.

Urza knew immediately. She'd been a fool to think he wouldn't.

"I swallowed it my own way," she told him, in no mood for a lengthy argument. "It's part of me now, where it belongs. I'll never lose it, no matter where you take me."

Xantcha wanted a world where she could pretend she'd been born. Never mind that by their best guess, she was living near the end of her sixth century and no more than seven decades younger than Urza himself. Urza wanted a plane where he could recruit an army. Their wants, she thought, should not have been incompatible, and perhaps they wouldn't have been, if Urza had been able to sleep. To give him his due, Xantcha granted that Urza tried to sleep. He knew he needed to dream, but whenever he attempted that treacherous descent from wakefulness, he found nightmares instead, screaming nightmares that spread like the stench of rotting fish on a summer's day. Until anyone within a half-day's journey could see the flames of Phyrexia and the metal and flesh apparition that Urza called Mishra.

Strangers did not welcome them for long. Recruiting an army was impossible. When she was lucky, Xantcha nursed a single harvest from the ground before they went 'walking again. When they found a truly hospitable world with abundant, rich soil, a broad swath of temperate climates and a wealth of vigorous cultures, Xantcha suggested that Urza build himself a tower on the loneliest island in the largest sea. He could 'walk to such a tower without difficulty and sleep, she'd hoped, without disturbing anyone.

Urza called the world Moag, and it became the home Xantcha had dreamed about. He built a sheer-walled tower with neither windows nor doors and filled it with artifacts. Within a decade, its rocky shores had become a place of prophecy and learning where

Urza warned pilgrims of Phyrexian evil and laid the foundations for the army he hoped eventually to raise.

Xantcha built a cottage with a garden, and in the seasons when it didn't need tending, she yawned and went exploring. Urza had made her another summoning crystal, which she wore in friendship but never expected to use. They met at his island whenever the moon was full, nowhere else, no other time. They'd become friends who could talk about anything because they knew which questions to avoid.

For thirty years, life-Xantcha's apparently immortal life- could not have been better. Until the bright autumn day on Moag's most intriguing southern continent when Xantcha caught the unexpected, unforgettable scent of glistening oil. She followed it to the source: the newly refurbished temple of a fire god with a taste for gold and blood sacrifice.

A born-flesh novice sat beside a burning alms box. For the hearths of the poor, he said, and though it looked like extortion, Xantcha threw copper into the flames. She yawned out her armor before entering the sanctuary. Trouble found her, one Phyrexian to another, before she reached the fire- bound altar.

Wrapped in concealing robes, it showed only its face

which had the jowls and grizzled beard of a mature man and the reek of the compleated. In its gloved hand it carried a gnarled wooden staff that immediately roused Xantcha's suspicion. She had a small sword on her hip. A mace would have been more useful, but out of keeping with the rest of her dandy's disguise.

"Where have you been?" it asked in a Phyrexian whisper that could have been mistaken for insects buzzing.

"Waiting," Xantcha replied with a newt's soft inflection. Waiting to see what would happen next.

It came faster than she'd expected. There was a priest of some new type inside those robes, and its staff was as false as its face. A web of golden power struck her armor. The priest wasn't expecting surprises, not from a newt. Xantcha kicked it once in the mid-section and again on the chin as it fell. Its head separated from its neck, leaving its flesh-face behind. Xantcha understood instantly why Urza could not purge his brother's last memory from his mind. She reached for the not-wooden staff and realized, belatedly, that there'd been witnesses.

Phyrexian witnesses. Four of them were surging out of the recesses to block her path. They all had staves, and she'd lost the advantage of surprise. The sanctuary roof had a smoke vent above the altar. Xantcha grabbed the priest's head instead of its staff as she braced herself for the agony of wringing a sphere from the cyst while the armor was still in place around her. There was blood in the sphere, but it resisted the efforts of the Phyrexians and their staves to bring it down as it expanded and lifted her out of immediate danger.

Willpower got Xantcha drifting silently just above the rooftops south of the temple. But willpower couldn't lift her high enough to catch the winds that would carry her to true safety beyond the walls. The cyst couldn't maintain both the sphere and the armor for long. Already, knife pains ripped through her stomach, and her mouth had filled with blood.

Woozy and desperate, Xantcha went to ground in the foulest midden she could find: a gaping pit behind a boneyard. She thought she'd die when the sphere dissolved on contact with the midden scum, and she found herself shoulder-deep in fermenting filth. With a death grip on the metal-mesh head-if she dropped it, she'd never have the courage to fish it out-Xantcha released her armor as well and hoped that uncontrolled nausea wouldn't prevent the cyst from recharging itself.

By sunset, when swarms of insects mistook her for their evening meal, Xantcha was ready to surrender to any Phyrexian brave enough to haul her out of her hiding place. She thought about gods and the inconvenience of not believing in any of them, then filled her lungs for a yawn. With a single, sharp pain that threatened, for one horrible moment, to fold her in half, the cyst discharged. Xantcha gasped her way through the mnemonic that would create the sphere, and just when she thought she had no endurance left, it began to swell.

She was seen-certainly she was scented-rising above the shambles' roofs, slowly at first, then faster as fresh air lifted her up. There were screams, clanging alarms and, from the open roof of the fire god's temple, a diaphanous

gout of black sorcery that fell short of its moving target. The winds blew westward, into the sunset. Xantcha let them carry her, until the moon was high, before she began the long tacks that would take her to Urza's tower.

The moon was a waxing crescent when Xantcha set down on the tower roof five nights later. Urza wasn't expecting her and wasn't pleased to have her within his tower walls. Xantcha had abandoned her clothes and scrubbed herself raw with sand and water without quite ridding herself of the midden's aroma. But Urza reserved his greatest displeasure for the metal-mesh head she stood on his work table.

"Where did you find that?" he demanded and stood like stone while Xantcha raced through an account of her misadventure in the southern city.

"You struck it down, before witnesses? And you brought it here, as a trophy? What were you thinking?"

Urza's enraged eyes lit up the chamber. The air around him shimmered with between-worlds light. Xantcha thought it wise to armor herself, but when she opened her mouth Urza enveloped her in stifling paralysis. Naked and defenseless, she endured a scathing lecture about the stupidity of newts who exposed themselves to their enemies and jeopardized the delicate plans of their friends.

"I smelled glistening oil," Xantcha countered when, toward dawn, Urza released her from his spell. She was angry by then and incautious. "I was curious. I didn't know it came from Phyrexian priests. Maybe it was just a coincidental cooking sauce! I didn't plan to destroy a Phyrexian, but it seemed better than letting it kill me, and as for witnesses, well, I am sorry about that. I didn't notice them standing there until it was too late. And I brought the head because I thought I'd better have proof, because I wasn't sure you'd believe me without, it. Should I have let myself be killed? Or captured? Maybe they could have dropped my head on the roof before they attacked! Would that have been better? Wiser, on my part?"

A silver globe appeared in Urza's hand. He cocked his arm.

"Go ahead, throw it. Then what? Make me into another mistake you can mourn? You can't change the past, Urza. The Phyrexians were here before I found them. Empty-headed fool that I am, I thought you'd want to know whatever I could learn, however I learned it. Waste not, want not, I thought you'd be glad I survived!" The globe vanished in a shower of bright red sparks. "I am. Truly. But they will have found me."

"Phyrexians are here, Urza. It's not necessarily the same thing. How do you suppose they found Dominaria in the first place? Searcher-priests look for more than artifacts. That thing-" Xantcha gestured at the metal-mesh head-"had a face no one would look twice at. The searchers have found a nice, little world, ripe for the plucking. They've set themselves up in the fire god's cult because what Phyrexia needs more than artifacts is ore for its furnaces, and Moag's a metal-rich world."

"They'll destroy Moag, Xantcha. It will all happen again." "Well, isn't that what you've been waiting for, a chance to right old wrongs?"

"No. No, the price is too high."

"Urza!" Xantcha lost patience with him. "Forget about

listening to me, do you ever listen to yourself?"

He stared at her, mortal-eyed, but as if she were a stranger rather than his companion of the centuries. "Go, Xantcha. I need to think. I will come for you at the full moon."

"Maybe I don't want to 'walk away from this. Maybe I want my vengeance!"

"Go, child! You're disturbing me. I must think. I will tell you my decision when I've made it, not before."

They were back to child again, and he had made his decision. Xantcha had been with Urza too long not to know when he was lying to her. He'd made a hole in the roof, and she took advantage of it. She gathered the weapons she hadn't discarded and the sack that held her traveling stash of gold and gems, these things the midden hadn't damaged at all. Only the sack desperately needed replacing, so she took one of Urza's and swapped the contents before yawning out the sphere. The hole closed as soon as she'd passed through it.

Morning had come, a beautiful morning with mackerel clouds streaking north by northeast, the direction Xantcha needed, if she were going back to her cottage, which she decided after a heartbeat's thought that she wasn't. Xantcha set her mind south, to the fire god's city. Urza was going to leave Moag, and despite her threats, Xantcha knew she'd go with him, but if he'd intended simply to leave, they could have 'walked already. They'd left other worlds with less warning. No, Urza had something planned, and Xantcha wanted to witness it.

As soon as Xantcha reached the coast, she found a prosperous villa and sneaked into it by moonlight. She left two silver coins and another world's garnet brooch on a night stand, in exchange for her pick of the young heir's wardrobe. His britches were tight and his boots too big, but overall she considered it a fair swap. She didn't linger until sunrise to learn the household's opinion.

Xantcha scuffed up her fine clothes when she reached the southern city and wove a tale of tragedy and coincidence for the apothecary whose shop window had the best view of the fire god's temple. The owl-eyed merchant didn't believe a word Xantcha said, but she could read, count, and compound a script better than either of his journeymen. He took her in with the promise of two meals a day, one hot, one cold, and a night-pallet across the threshold, which was what she'd wanted from the start.

She settled in to wait: one day, two days, three, four. Urza came on the fifth. Or rather, a ball of fire descended from the stars during the fifth night. It struck the temple with hideous force. Masonry, stone and burning timbers flew across the plaza, smashing through shutters and walls. Xantcha got her sword from its hiding place, bid an unobserved farewell to the apothecary, then went hunting for Phyrexians through the smoke.

Xantcha found a few, as terrified as any born-folk, or more so since glistening oil burnt with a hot blue flame. She put an end to their misery and with her armor to protect her from both flames and smoke made her way into the sanctuary. The journeymen had succumbed to her questions, and told her where the fire god's priests had their private quarters. Which was where Xantcha expected to

find-and steal-another ambulator.

She found a passage back to Phyrexia, but it was unlike any ambulator she'd seen before. Instead of a bottomless black pool, the flesh-faced priests had a solid-seeming disk that rose edgewise from the stone floor. Face on, it was as black as the ambulators Xantcha was familiar with. From behind, it simply wasn't there. One thing hadn't changed; it still had a palm-sized panel with seven black jewels where the disk emerged from the floor. Since she couldn't roll the standing-portal up and take it with her, Xantcha smashed the panel with her sword.

Smoke and screams belched out of the black disk before it collapsed. Xantcha guessed she'd closed it just in time. A pair of lines gouged into the stone was all that remained when the smoke cleared. She was rummaging through shelves and cabinets, hoping to find a familiar ambulator, when the air grew heavy. The other kind of between-worlds passage, Urza's kind of 'walking passage, was opening.

"It's me!" she shouted as he came into view.

"Xantcha! What are you doing here? I could have killed you."

They never had established whether Urza's armor would protect her from Urza's wrath or Urza's mistakes.

"I came for the ambulator. I knew they'd have one, and I wasn't sure you'd think to roll it." He hadn't when he rode the dragon into Phyrexia. "It was a new kind," she admitted. "I couldn't roll it up."

Urza stared at the lines in the floor. "No, it was a very old kind. Did you destroy it?"

He was so calm and reasonable, it worried her. "Yes. I broke the gems. There were screams, then nothing."

"Well, perhaps it is enough. If not, I have left my mark above, and I will leave a trail. Are you ready to 'walk, or are you staying here?"

"You want the Phyrexians to follow us?"

Urza nodded, smiling, and held out his hand. "I want them to pursue us with all their strength and leave Moag in peace."

Xantcha took his hand and said, "I don't think it works that way," but they were between-worlds and her words were lost.

Xantcha never knew if the second part of Urza's plan bore fruit, but the first was successful beyond his wildest dreams. He stopped laying a deliberate trail after the fourth world beyond Moag, but that didn't stop the searcher-priests and the avenger teams they led.

Sometimes she and Urza got a year's respite between attacks, never more. Urza reached into his past for sentries he called Yotians, never-fail guardians shaped from whatever materials a new world offered: clay, stone, wood, or ice.

He'd 'walked her to ice worlds before. They were dark, airless places where the sun was lost among the stars and the ice as hard as steel. Save for the gas worlds, where there was no solid ground at all, ice worlds were the least hospitable worlds in the multi-verse. They never stayed long on ice, no matter how close the pursuit.

Then, years after Moag by Urza's reckoning, he found a world where the ice was melting, and the air was cold but breathable. Once it had been a world like Moag. Whole forests and cities could be glimpsed through the ice when the light was right. Now it was a brutal place, with men who'd forgotten what cities were.

Xantcha thought it was as inhospitable as any airless world, but Urza disagreed and she was disinclined to argue. He hadn't slept soundly since they left Moag. The simple act of closing his eyes was enough to trigger the nightmares-hallucinations of the past, of the Ineffable. To Xantcha's abiding horror, the forbidden name had returned to Urza's memory and came easily to him when he battled through his nightmares.

Years without proper sleep had taken their toll. Urza's restlessness had grown into a sort of frenzy. He was never still, always pacing or wringing his hands. He babbled constantly. Xantcha fashioned wax earplugs so she could sleep. With Phyrexians on their trail, they never strayed far apart.

And Urza needed her. Without her, Urza often didn't know what was real from what was not. Without her gentle nagging, he would have forgotten to carve the Yotians or given them the appropriate orders. Without her willingness to brave his hallucinations he would have gouged the gemstone eyes from his skull and put an end to his misery.

Sitting on the opposite side of a fire, with a score of icy Yotians clanking patrol through the frigid night, Xantcha wondered if she should let him die. They were each over eight hundred years old and though she could still pass for an unbearded youth, Urza looked his age, or worse. The arcane power that enabled him to change his appearance at will had become erratic. On nights like tonight, even though he wasn't hallucinating, Urza seemed to be surrounded by a between-worlds miasma. Viewed from some angles, he had no substance at all, just seething light that hurt her eyes.

"Will you eat? Can you eat?" Xantcha asked gently, trying to ignore the way the hearth flames were visible through his robes.

Food was no substitute for sleep and dreams, but it helped keep Urza looking mortal. She'd seasoned the stew pot with the aromatic herbs that had tempted him before. But it didn't work this time.

"I'm hollow," he said, a disturbingly accurate assessment. "Food won't fill me, Xantcha. Eat all you can. Pack the rest. I feel the eyes of the multiverse upon us."

Xantcha lost her appetite. When Urza thought the multiverse was watching him, Phyrexians weren't usually far behind. She forced down a small portion-the between-worlds was easier on a near-empty stomach-and filled a waterskin with the rest. The ice-shaped Yotians were almost as restless as Urza. Xantcha slung the waterskin and other essentials from a shoulder harness and checked her weapons. The second-best way to deal with Phyrexians was to batter them apart. She'd long since abandoned her Moag sword in favor of a short club with a jagged chunk of pure iron for its head.

The best way to deal with Phyrexian avengers, however, was to hide, and let Urza demolish them with sorcery and

artifice, then wait until he shaped himself into a man again. Waiting was the difficult part. As the years and worlds and ambushes accumulated, Urza had never had a problem vanquishing the avengers, but increasingly he lost himself in the aftermath. Two ambushes ago, he'd devolved into a pillar of rainbow light that shimmered for three days before condensing into a solid, familiar form. Considering the brutal, backwater worlds they frequented, Xantcha desperately wanted an ambulator and the wherewithal to set its black stones for a hospitable world.

She'd raised the subject as often as she'd dared, which didn't include this night with the ice Yotians clattering like crystals through the shadows.

The ambush came at dawn, in gusts of hot, sour Phyrexian wind. There were a score of them, not counting the two searcher-priests who squatted beside the flat-black ambulator. This time the avengers resembled huge turtles with bowl-shaped carapaces and four broad, shovel-like feet, ideal for churning through snow and ice. Instead of claws or teeth, their weapons were beams of dark radiance that shot through an opening where a turtle's head would emerge from its shell.

Xantcha left the turtles for Urza and the Yotians. Safe in her armor and screaming loudly, she charged the searcher-priests instead, hoping to steal their ambulator. They took one look at her and retreated into the ambulator, rolling it up behind them, abandoning the avengers. She cursed them for their cowardice, but searchers were hard to replace. They were subtle for Phyrexians, far more subtle than avengers who, because they were so powerful, were also stupid.

She supposed the searchers could bring reinforcements, though, so far, once they left, they'd stayed gone. But the other skirmishes had been over sooner. Ice was not the ideal defense when the avengers' weapon was heat. The Yotians had been utterly destroyed without bringing down a single Phyrexian, which meant that Urza had to face them all. He had the skill and power, though the turtles were a bit tougher, a bit nastier they'd been in the last ambush, as if Phyrexia were learning from its failures-a frightening notion in and of itself.

There were only eight of the avengers left. Urza had destroyed two of those with dazzling streaks of raw power from his jeweled eyes. No one learned faster than Urza. He never tired nor depleted his resources. So long as there was substance beneath his feet or stars in the sky overhead, Urza the Artificer could work his uniquely potent magic.

Then, suddenly, his strikes became indecisive.

A turtle scuttled forward unchallenged and knocked Urza backward; the first time Xantcha had ever seen him touched in battle. He destroyed it with a glut of flame, but not before the other turtles pelted him with bursts of darkness.

After that Xantcha expected Urza to make short work of the enemy. Instead he became vaporous, a man of light and shadow. A turtle paw passed directly through him. Xantcha thought it was another of Urza's tactical surprises, until she watched his counter-strike pass through the turtle.

Xantcha had imagined the end many times, but she never

thought the end would come from turtles on an ice-bound world.

Her armor would protect her ... probably. Her club would almost certainly have no effect on avengers meant to destroy Urza the Artificer, but Xantcha would sooner face her personal end right here, right now, than risk capture and return to Phyrexia, or-even worse-eternity on this icebound world. She leapt onto the back of the nearest turtle and took aim at the forward gap in its carapace.

The turtle proved quite agile, bucking like an unbroken horse in its efforts to throw Xantcha off. She held on until two of the other avengers began targeting her instead of Urza. The armor held, barely. Xantcha felt the heat of dark magic, front and back, and the crack of her ribs as they began to break, one by one, under the hammer-and-anvil pressure.

The last thing Xantcha saw was Urza, brighter than the sun....

Not a bad sight to carry into the darkness.