Planeswalker

CHAPTER 21

"If Gix could find me, he would find me. He would have found me before I left Pincar City. He would have come for me while I slept. If he didn't want to be seen, he would have sent sleepers after me."

Eight days after her narrow escape, Xantcha sat in the branches of a oak tree. The sun would set sometime during the thunderstorm that was bearing in from the ocean. She'd been watching the clouds pile up all afternoon, watching the lightning since she left Russiore with the day-traders. Her armor tended to attract lightning even as it protected her from the bolts, and a big, old tree, standing by itself on a hillside, wouldn't be a good hiding place much longer.

Once the storm struck, Xantcha figured she'd find a saner place to wait for Urza. With all that metal and exposed sinew, Gix wasn't apt to come looking for her in the rain.

"He didn't know we were here. He didn't recognize me until he found the spark in my mind."

The spark. She'd had a headache the first day away from Pincar City, but her back had ached, too, along with her neck and jaw and every other part of her body: the aftermath of total terror.

There were uglier beasts in the multiverse, meaner ones, and possibly more dangerous ones. None of them had a demon's malignant aura. Born-folk had a word, rape. It occurred on every world, in every language. In Phyrexian, as Xantcha understood it, the word for rape was Gix.

Xantcha had scrubbed her skin raw even though Gix hadn't touched her because she couldn't scour her mind. She'd rehearsed a score of confessions, too, and her greatest fear as the wind whipped the branches around her wasn't that Gix would find her but that he'd already found Urza ... or Ratepe.

Urza could take care of himself. Xantcha had to believe that; she couldn't let herself believe, even for a heartbeat, that Gix had told the truth when he'd said "I made the brothers, too, and then I made you." And if she believed that Urza's mind was his own, then she could be confident it would take the Ineffable to challenge him in single combat. But whatever she managed to believe about herself and Urza, it didn't help when she thought of Ratepe, alone and unsuspecting on the Ohran ridge. Rat wouldn't have a chance, whether Gix came to kill or corrupt.

And when all those memories of Ratepe's face had freed her from Gix's thrall, surely some of them had given away the cottage's location, if Gix were inclined to find the man who went with that face.

"Gix doesn't care," she told the oak tree. "Phyrexians have no imagination."

Rain pelted, driven by the wind, and Xantcha was drenched in an instant. Urza's armor was strange that way. It would protect her from fire or the complete absence of breathable air, but it was entirely vulnerable to plain water. Xantcha clambered down a branch or two, then dropped straight to the ground. She found an illusion of shelter among the briar bushes tangled at the bottom of the hill.

Urza would find her no matter where she hid. Her heart, he said, pulled him between-worlds. He'd grumble about the

rain, if he arrived before the storm died out. Not that any weather affected him; Urza simply didn't like surprises. He wouldn't like her confession.

The storm moved south without clearing the air. A steady rain continued to fall, as a starless night closed in around the briars. Xantcha tried to stay awake, but it was a losing struggle. She hadn't slept much in Russiore. She'd been busy, for one thing, distributing nine days' worth of screaming spiders in less than eight and afraid to close her eyes for the other. The briars were secure and friendly by comparison and the rain's patter, a lullaby.

Xantcha had no idea how long she'd been asleep when Urza awoke her with her name.

"Over here!" she called back.

The rain had stopped, save for drips from the leaves around her. A few stars shone through the thinning clouds, silhouetting Urza as he strode down the hill.

"Ready to go home?" He sounded cheerful. Xantcha told herself that confession would be easier with Urza in a good mood. "No sacks?" He cocked his head at her empty hands and shoulders. "You couldn't get his food and such?" Urza generally avoided choosing a name for Ratepe.

"Urza, I have to talk to you-"

"Problems in Russiore? Are they in the midst of a famine?"

"Not exactly. I didn't have time to scrounge supplies. Something came up-"

"Not to worry. I have other plans, anyway. We'll talk at the cot-tage."

He seized Xantcha's wrist, and before she could protest they were between-worlds. The journey was swift, as always. Two strides through nothing, and they were on the Ohran ridge. It was also, as always, disorienting. Urza stepped out several hundred paces from the cottage to give Xantcha a chance to gather her wits before they greeted Ratepe.

Xantcha's nerves reassembled themselves slowly, in part because she had to assure herself that the cottage was unharmed. Urza had gotten ahead of her. She ran to catch up.

"Urza, I said we have to talk. There's a problem. You. Ratepe. Your brother. The spiders-" All her carefully rehearsed statements had vanished in the between-worlds.

"I've thought it through. I can do the work of all three of us for the next nine days. I'll distribute the artifacts that he's made for us, yours and mine together, and get the next batch assembled. It's another aspect of time: I'll live a little faster. It's good practice, crawling before walking. The spiders won't end this war, Xantcha. They'll only buy time until I solve the Phyrexian problem at its source."

Urza had gotten over his obsession with righting his brother's fate, but he still talked of traveling back in time, much further back in time. Urza wanted to meet the Thran and fight beside them in their final battle against the Phyrexians. He thought they might know enemy's true home and, although he didn't say it, Xantcha believed Urza hoped go behind the Thran, all the way to the Phyrexians' first world to annihilate rather than exile them.

Gix had said the Thran were waiting. The demon could have rummaged the name out of her memories or out of Mishra

during the war. Almost certainly Gix wasn't telling the truth; at least not the important parts of it, but Urza needed to know what had happened in the catacomb beneath Avohir's temple in Pincar City.

"I met ... I found ..." She was still tongue-tied. Had the demon left something in her that left her able to think but not to speak? It wasn't impossible. Gix savored fear spiced with helplessness and frustration. She didn't know the measure of the red light's power, but she'd lost an entire afternoon in the catacomb, and when Ratepe burst out of memory to save her, she'd been doing the unthinkable: walking toward Phyrexia.

"Xantcha?" Urza stopped. He faced her and gave her his full attention.

"We have to go back to Pincar City."

"No, Efuan Pincar is out of the question. Anywhere we've found sleepers is out of the question. You and he have to go someplace, of course. I don't want anyone around while I'm working this time. I could wait. I should wait until after the Glimmer Moon rises. We can never know the future, Xantcha. I'm sure of that. Only the past is forever, and only now gives us choices. I choose to give the next nine days to you and him so you will always have them. Tell me where you want to be, and I'll 'walk you both there in the morning."

Nine days. Nine days in hiding while she sorted out her tangled thoughts? It was the coward's way, but Xantcha seized it. "I'll talk to him." A lie. Xantcha could feel that confessing to Ratepe would be no easier than confessing to Urza. "We'll decide where we want to go."

Ratepe welcomed them with the enthusiasm and relief of any talkative youth who'd kept company with himself for entirely too long. He cast several inquiring glances Xantcha's way. She pretended not to notice them while Urza announced his intention to reclaim his workroom for the next nine days.

"You told Urza," Ratepe snapped to Xantcha the moment they were alone together. "Now he's taking over everything! Just tell me, did you get my artifacts attached to Avohir's altar?"

"One," Xantcha answered truthfully. "There were sleepers in the temple, made up as Shratta. And Shratta dead in the catacombs. They were finished years ago, Ratepe. If there are Shratta left, they're like the Efuands in the Red-Stripes. They're in league, consciously or not, with Phyrexia." She thought of Gix; this wasn't the time to tell him, not when they were both angry. "I put your shatter-spiders, and screamers, too, in places where the glistening scent was strong. I didn't get to the barracks."

Ratepe threw his head back and swore at the ceiling. "What were you thinking! I don't want to bring Avohir's sanctuary down-not while the Red-Stripe barracks is still standing!" He shook his head and stood with his back to her. "When it wasn't what I expected, you should've waited. Sweet Avohir, what did you tell Urza?"

Xantcha's guilt and anxiety evaporated. "I didn't tell him anything!" she shouted.

"Then keep your voice down!"

"Stop telling me what to do!"

They were on opposite sides of the table, ready to

lunge at each other, and not with the passion that normally accompanied their reunions. Ratepe seemed to have outrun himself. Jaw clenched, eyes pleading, he looked across the table, but Xantcha was similarly paralyzed. It was her nature, created in Phyrexia and shaped over time in Urza's company, to back down or explode when cornered. This was a moment when she couldn't see a clear path in either direction.

The door was at her back. Xantcha ducked and ran out, leaving it open behind her, listening for the sounds that never came. She settled in the darkness, wrestling with her conscience, until the lamps in her shared room had flickered and died. Approaching the door through starlight, she saw a dark silhouette at the table, where Ratepe had fallen asleep with his head on his arms. She crept past him, as silently as she'd crept toward the Pincar catacomb. Her bed was strung with a creaking rope mattress. Xantcha quietly tucked herself in a corner by her treasure chest.

Ratepe was sprawled on the bed when she awoke. Urza was in the doorway, the golden light of dawn behind him.

"Are you ready to "walk?" he asked.

Urza never came into her side of the cottage. Perhaps he thought she'd been sleeping in the corner since Ratepe arrived. They weren't ready to 'walk anyway; Ratepe wasn't ready to wake up. He was cross-grained from the moment his eyes opened. Xantcha expected him to start something they'd all regret, but instead he just said, "You decide," as he slipped past Urza on his way to the well.

"We don't need you to 'walk us anywhere," Xantcha said to Urza as she stretched the kinks out of her legs. Her foot felt as if her boot was lined with hot, sharp needles.

"I don't want you near here while I work."

"We won't be."

"Don't dawdle, then. I want to get started!"

Ratepe stayed away while Xantcha rearranged her traveling gear. She packed a good deal of gold and silver, which could be traded wherever they went, but included copper, too, in case they got no farther than their closest neighbors along the frontier between the ridge and the coast. She threw in flour for journey bread, as well, and thought about the hunter's bow suspended from the rafters. Nine days could be an uncomfortably long time to live off journey bread, but a bow could be troublesome in a city. In the end Xantcha put a few more coins in her belt purse, left the bow on its hook, and met a sulking Ratepe beside the well.

Urza either didn't notice or didn't care that Xantcha and Ratepe were scarcely speaking to each other. He'd been away from his workroom for nearly a half-year and didn't wait to see the sphere rise before sealing himself in with his ideas.

The morning sun was framed with fair weather clouds against a rich blue sky. Prairie wildflowers blanketed the land above which the sphere soared. It was difficult, in the face of such natural beauty, to remain sullen and sour, but Xantcha and Ratepe both rose to the challenge. A northwest wind stream caught the sphere and carried it toward Kovria, southeast of the ridge. There was nothing in the Kovrian barrens to hold Xantcha's attention, no destinations worth mentioning, but changing their course

meant choosing their course, so they drifted into Kovria.

By mid-afternoon, the tall-grass prairies of the ridge had given way to badlands.

"Where are we going?" Ratepe asked, virtually the first full sentence he'd uttered since the sphere rose.

"Where does it look like we're going?"

"Nowhere."

"Then nowhere, it is. Nowhere's good enough for me."

"Put us down. You're crazed, Xantcha. Something happened in Efuan Pincar, and it's left you crazed. I don't want to be up here with you."

Xantcha brought them down on a plain of baked dirt and weedy scrub. They were both silent while the sphere collapsed and powdered.

"What went wrong?" Ratepe asked as he brushed the last of the white stuff from his face. "It's not just sleepers. Sleepers wouldn't frighten you, and you're afraid. I didn't think there was anything that could do that."

"Lots of things frighten me. Urza frightens me, sometimes. You frighten me. The between-worlds frightens me. Demons frighten me." Xantcha tore a handful of leaves off the nearest bush and began shredding them. Let Ratepe guess; let him choose, if he could.

"There was a demon in Avohir's temple? In the catacombs with the dead Shratta? A Phyrexian demon?"

Ratepe was uncommonly good at guessing and choosing. "I don't know any other kind."

"Avohir's mercy! You and Urza didn't find demons anywhere else, did you?" "I didn't."

"Why Efuan Pincar? If a Phyrexian demon was going to come to Dominaria, why come to Efuan Pincar. We keep to ourselves. When our ancestors left Argive, they never looked back. They settled on the north shore of Gulmany because it's so far away from everywhere else. We're not rich. We don't bother our neighbors, and they've never bothered us. We don't even have an army-which is probably why we had trouble with the Shratta and the Red-Stripes, but why would that interest Phyrexia? I don't understand. Do you?"

"I told you, demons frighten me. I didn't ask questions, just... just got away." She stripped another handful of leaves. Xantcha wanted to tell Ratepe everything, but the words to get her started weren't in her mind.

"The day you bought me, I told you that you were a lousy liar. You may be three thousand years old, Xantcha, but my eight-year-old brother could fib better than you. When he got into trouble, though, I could guess what he was hiding, 'cause I'd hidden it myself. I can't guess about demons."

Xantcha scattered the leafy bits and faced Ratepe. "It was Gix. I smelled sleepers in the sanctuary, I followed the smell, planting spiders as I went, yours and Urza's both. I wound up way underground, in the dark. There was a passageway, one of the big, old, upright ones, and there was Gix."

"You said Gix had been killed in the Sixth Sphere." "The Seventh. He was excoriated, consigned to endless torment. We were taught that nothing escapes the Seventh Sphere." "Another Phyrexian lie? You're sure it was Gix,

not some other demon?"

"Yes." One answer for both questions. "Did he hurt you?"

Ratepe never failed to ask the question Xantcha wasn't expecting. "I'm here, aren't I?"

"Then, what's got you so riled? Why were we headed 'nowhere'? Unless ... wait, I get it now. Urza's sent you off with the mere mortal. He's not that crazed. He knows what I am, who I'm not. He's going back after Gix, and you're here with me instead of-"

"I didn't tell Urza." The words belched out of her.

"You found a Phyrexian demon under Avohir's temple and you didn't tell Urza?"

She turned away in shame.

"Of course," Ratepe sighed. "He'd yell at you and blame you, just as I've yelled at you and blamed you. And you are a lot like my little brother when you get accused of something that's not your fault. And Gix. Gix was the one who got Mishra. Mishra didn't know-not until it was too late. Strange thing. They fought over those two stones that are Urza's eyes now, but I don't think either brother could hear the stones sing."

Xantcha took a deep breath. "Do you wonder why you can hear them."

"I can't hear them. I only hear Mishra's stone. I don't know for sure that the Mightstone sings, but-yes, I do wonder. I think about it a lot, more than I want to. Why? Did Gix say something about the stones?"

"Yes. He said he made them, and then he said something about you." And Urza, Xantcha's mind added, but not her tongue.

Ratepe was pale and speechless.

"He could have gotten your name out of my mind. I was careful what I gave him, enough to keep him from digging too deep. But I got in trouble. Serious trouble." Xantcha's hands were shaking. She clasped them together behind her back. "He had me, Rat. I was walking toward the passageway. I would've gone into Phyrexia, and that would've been the end of me, I'm sure. Then, suddenly, all I could think of was you."

"Me?"

"You're the first 'mere mortal' I've gotten to know. You've..." Blood rushed to Xantcha's face. She was hot, embarrassed, but she stumbled on. "Thinking about you pulled me back. But Gix was in my mind when I did, so he could have taken your name and made a lie around it. Everything he said could've been lies ... probably was lies." And why share Gix's lies with anyone? "He didn't tell me anything I didn't know, except, maybe, about the Thran. And, well, Mishra knew some things about the Thran."

Though Xantcha could feel the blood draining from her own face, Ratepe's was still dangerously pale.

"Tell me what Gix said about me, then what he said about Mishra and the Thran. Maybe I can tell you if it's lies or not."

"Gix said he wondered if I'd found you, as if he'd planned that we were supposed to meet."

"And about the Thran?"

"When I said that Urza would finish what the Thran had started against the Phyrexians, he laughed and said the

Thran were waiting for Urza and that they'd take back what was theirs. Gix was thinking about Urza's eyes-at least, I started thinking about Urza's eyes and how they were the last of the Thran powerstones. Gix laughed louder, and the next thing I knew, I was thinking about you and not walking toward the portal. What he said about you and what he said about me, they're lies. Even if Mishra was compleated in Phyrexia... even if his flesh and blood were rendered for the vats ... I was one of thousands. We were exactly alike. We don't even scar, Ratepe. We couldn't tell ourselves apart!"

"Lies," Ratepe said so softly that Xantcha wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly and asked him to repeat himself. "Lies. The Weakstone's a sort of memory. Mostly it's Mishra's memory, but I've been hit with some Thran memories and some of Urza's, too, though not as strong. With Mishra, there's personality. I'm thankful I never met him while he was alive. He'd've killed me for sure. With the Thran and Urza, it's like faded paintings. But if you were Mishra-if any part of you was Mishra-the Weakstone would have recognized him in you, even though you're Phyrexian. And if I'd been touched by Gix, I'd be dead. The Weakstone doesn't like Phyrexians, Xantcha, and it especially doesn't like Gix."

"Urza's eye doesn't like me?"

Ratepe shook his head, "Sorry, no. It sees you, sometimes, but if Urza doesn't trust you, the Weakstone could be responsible because it doesn't trust you."

"The Weakstone has opinions?"

"Influence. It tries to influence."

Xantcha considered Urza's eyes watching her and Ratepe each time they retreated to her side of the wall. "It must be overjoyed when we're together."

Color returned to Ratepe's face in a single heartbeat. "I'm not Mishra. I make my own opinions."

"What do you know from Mishra and the Weakstone about the Thran and the Phyrexians?" Xantcha asked when Ratepe's blush had spread past his ears.

"They hate each other, with a deep, blinding hate that gives no quarter. But I'll tell you honestly, in the images I've gotten of their war, I can't tell one side from the other. The Thran weren't flesh and blood, no more than the Phyrexians. Even Mishra's just something the Weakstone uses. Urza's notion that the Thran sacrificed themselves to save Dominaria, maybe that's the Mightstone's influence, but it's not true. My world's better off without both of them, Thran and Phyrexians together."

They'd wandered away from their gear. Xantcha headed back. "Maybe Urza will succeed someday in "walking between times as easily as he 'walks between worlds. I'd like to know what really happened back there at Koilos. I'd like to see it for myself. It's a shadow over everything I've ever known, all the way back to the vats."

Ratepe corrected her pronunciation of Koilos, reducing the three syllables to two and moving the accent to the first.

"I heard it from Urza and he's the one who named it," she retorted.

"I guess language drifts in three thousand years. It's still there, you know-well, it was three hundred years ago

when the ancestors left Argive."

Xantcha stopped short. "I thought it wasn't recorded where the first Efuands came from. That's part of your myth."

"It is ... part of the myth, that is. But Father said our language is mostly Argivian and the oldest books, before the Shratta burnt them, had been written in Argivian. And, if you look at a map, Efuan Pincar is about as far away from Argive as you can get without sailing right off the edge."

"And Koilos?" Xantcha stuck with Urza's pronunciation. "It's still there in Argive?"

"It's not in Argivia. It never was, but folk knew where it was three hundred years ago. It's like The Antiquity Wars, something that's not supposed to be forgotten. I guess it was inaccessible for most of the Ice Age, but when the world got warmer again, the kings of Argivia and their neighbors sent folk up on the Kher to make sure the ruins were still ruins."

"Urza's never mentioned them. I just assumed Koilos vanished with Argoth."

"You've seen a map of what's left of Terisiare?"

Xantcha shrugged. There were maps in her copies of The Antiquity Wars. She'd assumed they were wrong and paid no attention to them.

"We'd have to go over the Sea of Laments. We'd never make it there and back in nine days," Ratepe said with a smile that invited conspiracy. Waste not, want not. If Gix hadn't lied about the young Efuand, they were all doomed.

"We'd make landfall on Argivia in two very cold days and colder nights. Getting back would be more difficult, but it's that or go back to the cottage and tell Urza that I saw Gix in Pincar City."

"He wouldn't be pleased to see us."

The journey over the Sea of Laments was as uneventful as it was unpleasant. They'd traded for blankets and an oil-cloth sail in a village on Gulmany's south coast. The fisherman who took Xantcha's silver thought she was insane; a little while later, both Ratepe and Xantcha agreed with him, but by then it was too late. They were in the wash of a roaring wind river and remained there until they saw land again. For two days and nights there was nothing to do but huddle beneath blankets and the sail.

"Don't you have to keep one hand free?" Ratepe had shouted early on, as they struggled to wrap the blankets evenly around their feet.

"Tack across this?' she shouted back. "We're here for the ride."

"How many times have you crossed the sea?"

"Once, by mistake."

"Sorry I asked."

Misery ended after sunrise on the third day. There was land below, land as far as the eye could see. Xantcha thought down and thrust her hand through the sphere for good measure. Her hand turned white as they plummeted down to familiar altitudes.

As her hand began to thaw, Xantcha asked, "Now, which

way to Koilos?"

"Where are we?"

"Don't you recognize anything from your maps?"

"Avohir's sweet mercy, Xantcha, maps don't look like the ground!"

They found an oasis and a goatherd who seemed unfazed by the sight of two strangers in a place where strangers couldn't be common. He spoke a language neither of them had heard before but recognized the word Koilos in its older, three-syllable form. He rattled off a long speech before pointing to the southeast. The only words they recognized, beside Koilos, were Urza and Mishra. Xantcha traded a silver-set agate for all the food the youth was carrying. He strode away, whistling and laughing.

"What do you think he said?" Xantcha asked when they'd returned to the gulch where their gear was hidden. "Other than that we're fools and idiots."

"The usual curses against Urza and Mishra."

The sphere flowed over them and they were rising before Ratepe continued.

"Haven't you ever noticed how empty everything is? Even in Efuan Pincar, which was as far from Argoth as it could be, it's nothing to ride through wilderness and find yourself in the middle of ruins from the time before the ice and the war. Here in Argivia, according to the books the Ancestors brought to Pincar, they were still living in the shadows of the past-literally. They didn't have the wherewithal to build the buildings like the old ruins. Not enough people, not enough stone, not enough metal, not enough knowledge of how it was done. Urza talks about the mysteries of the Thran. The books my father studied talked about the mysteries of Urza and Mishra. They all talk about Koilos. It's the place in Terisiare, new or old, where everything comes to an end. It's a name to conjure darkness."

Xantcha caught a tamer wind stream and adjusted their drift. "Does everyone in Efuan Pincar talk about such things? Are you a nation of storytellers?"

Ratepe laughed bitterly. "No, just my father, and he taught me. My rather was a scholar, and both my grandfathers, too. The first things I remember are the three of them arguing about men and women who'd died a thousand years ago. I was ashamed of them. I hated lessons; I wanted to be anything but a scholar. Then the Shratta came. My grandfathers were dead by then, Avohir's mercy. My father did whatever he had to do to take care of us. When we got to the country, he learned farming as if it were a Sumifan chronicle, but he missed Pincar. He missed not having students to teach or someone to argue with. My mother told me to sit at his feet and learn or she'd take her belt to me. I never argued with my mother." Xantcha stared at Ratepe who was staring at the horizon, eyes glazed and fists clenched, the way he looked whenever he remembered what he'd lost. Urza had buried Mishra beneath layers of obsession, and there was little enough in Xantcha's own life worth cherishing. Looking at Ratepe, trying to imagine his grief, all she felt was envy.

The winds were steady, the sky was clear, and the moon was bright. They soared until midnight and were in the air again after a sunrise breakfast. By midday they saw the

reflection of a giant lake to their south, and by the end of a long afternoon they were over the foothills of the Kher Ridge. There were no villages, no roads, not even the bright green dot of an oasis. Ratepe closed his eyes and folded his hands. "Now what?" Xantcha asked. "I'm praying for a sign." "I thought you knew!"

"I do, somewhat. The landscape's changed a bit since Mishra was here last. But I think I'll recognize the mountains when I see them."

"We're fools, you know. At most we'll have a day at Koilos-if we find it."

"Look for a saddle-back mountain with three smaller peaks in front of it."

"A saddle-back," Xantcha muttered, and lowered her hand to get a better look.

The setting sun threw mountain-sized shadows that obscured as much as they revealed, but there was nothing that looked like a double-peaked mountain, and the wind streams were starting to get treacherous as the air cooled. Xantcha looked for a place to set up their night camp. A patch of flat ground, a bit lighter than its surroundings and shaped like an arrowhead, beckoned.

"I'm taking us down there for the night," she told Ratepe, dropping the sphere out of the wind stream.

He said something in reply. Xantcha didn't catch the words. They'd caught a crosswind that was determined to keep her off the arrowhead. She felt like she'd been the victor in a bare-knuckle brawl by the time the sphere collapsed.

Ratepe sprang immediately to his feet. "Avohir answers prayers!" he shouted, running toward a stone near the arrowhead's tip.

Time had taken a toll on the stone, which stood a bit taller than Ratepe himself. The spiraled carvings were weathered to illegibility, but to find such a stone in this place could only mean one thing.

Ratepe lifted Xantcha into the air. "We've found the path! Are you sure you don't want to keep going?"

She thought about it a moment. "I'm sure." Wriggling free, she explored the marks with her fingertips. Here and there, it was still possible to discern a curve or angle, places that might have been parallel grooves or raised dot patterns that struck deep in memory. "Koilos isn't a place I want to see first by moonlight."

"Good point. Too many ghosts," Ratepe agreed with a sigh. "But we will see it-Koilos, with my own eyes. Seven thousand years. My father ..." He shook his head and walked away from the stone.

Xantcha didn't need to ask to know what he hadn't said.

The desert air didn't hold its heat. They were cold and hungry before the stars unveiled themselves. Xantcha doled out small portions of journey bread and green-glowing goat cheese, the last of the dubious edibles they'd traded from the goatherd. The cheese and its indescribable taste clung to the roof of Xantcha's mouth. Ratepe wisely stuck to the journey bread. He fell asleep while Xantcha sat listening to her stomach complain, as she watched the sky and the weathered stone and thought-a lot-of water.

The sphere reeked of cheese when she yawned it at dawn. Ratepe, displaying a healthy sense of self-preservation,

said nothing about the smell.

It was all willpower that morning. The wind streams flowed out of the mountains, not into them. She'd been about to give up and let the sphere drift back to the desert when Ratepe spotted another stone, toppled by age. Xantcha banked the sphere into the valley it seemed to mark. They hadn't been in it long when it doglegged to the right and they saw, in the distance, a saddle-back mountain overshadowing three smaller peaks.

With Mishra's memories to guide them, they had no trouble weaving through the mountain spurs until they came to the cleft and hollowed plateau Urza had named Koilos, the Secret Heart. Xantcha could have sought the higher streams and brought them over the top. She chose to follow the cleft instead and couldn't have said why if Ratepe had asked. But he stayed silent.

Seven thousand years, and the battle scars remained: giant pockings in the cliffs on either side of them, cottage-sized chunks of rubble littering the valley floor. Here and there was a shadow left by fire, not sun. And finally there was the cavern fortress itself, built by the Thran, rediscovered by two brothers, then laid bare during the war: ruins within ruins.

"That's where they hid from the dragons," Ratepe said, pointing to a smaller cave nearly hidden behind a hill of rubble.

"I didn't expect it to be so big."

"Everything's smaller now. Smell anything?"

"Time," Xantcha replied, and not facetiously. The sense of age was everywhere, in the plateau, the cleft which had shattered it, the Thran, and the brothers. But nowhere did she sense Phyrexia.

"You're sure?"

"It will be enough if I know that Gix lied."

Xantcha started up the path to the cavern mouth. Ratepe fell behind as he paused to examine whatever caught his eye. He jogged up the path, catching her just before she entered the shadows. "There's nothing left. I thought for sure there'd be something."

"Urza and I, we're older than forever, Ratepe, and Koilos is older than us."

Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the darkness. Ratepe found the past he was looking for strewn across the stone: hammers and chisels preserved by the cavern itself. He hefted a mallet, its wood dark with age but still sturdy.

"Mishra might have held this."

"In your dreams, Ratepe," Xantcha retorted, unable to conceal her disappointment.

Koilos was big and old but as dead as an airless world. It offered no insights to her about the Thran or the Phyrexians or even about the brothers, no matter how many discarded tools or pots Ratepe eagerly examined.

"We may as well leave," she said when the afternoon was still young and Ratepe had just found a scrap of cloth.

"Leave? We haven't seen everything yet."

"There's no water, and we don't have a lot of food with us, unless you want to try some of that cheese. What's here to see?"

"I don't know. That's why we have to stay. I'm only

halfway around this room, and there's an open passage at the back! And I want to see Koilos by moonlight."

Urza's idea, in the beginning, had been to get her and Ratepe away from the cottage, to give them some time together. Koilos surely wasn't what Urza had in mind, but Ratepe was enjoying himself. Whether they left now or in the morning wasn't going to make much difference in the return trip to Gulmany, and considering what that journey home was going to take out of her, Xantcha decided she could use some rest.

"All right. Wake me at sunset, then."

Xantcha didn't think she'd fall asleep on the stone but she did until Ratepe shook her shoulder.

"Come see. It's really beautiful, in a stark way, like a giant's tomb."

Sunset light flooded through the cavern mouth. Ratepe had stirred enough dust to turn the air into ruddy curtains streaked with shadows. They walked hand in hand to the ledge where the path ended and the cavern began. The hollowed plateau appeared drenched in blood. Xantcha was transfixed by the sight, but Ratepe wanted her to turn around.

"There are carvings everywhere," he said. "They appeared like magic out of the shadows once the sunlight came in."

Xantcha turned and would have collapsed if Ratepe hadn't been holding her. "What's wrong?"

"It's writing, Ratepe. It's writing, and I can read it, most of it. It's like the lessons carved into the walls of the Fane of Flesh." "What does it say?"

"Names. Mostly names and numbers-places. Battles, who fought who... ." Her eyes followed the column carvings. She'd gone cold and scarcely had the strength to fill her lungs. "What names? Any that I'd recognize?"

"Gix," she said, though there was another that she recognized: Yawgmoth, which she didn't-couldn't-say aloud. "And Xantcha, among the numbers." "Phyrexian?" "Thran."

"We know they fought." Ratepe freed his fingers from her death grip.

Xantcha grabbed them again. "No, they didn't fight. Not the Phyrexians against the Thran. The Thran fought themselves." "You can't be reading it right."

"I'm reading it because it's the same writing that's carved in the walls of every Fane in Phyrexia! Some of the words are unfamiliar, but-Ratepe! My name is up there. My name is up there because Xantcha is a number carved in the floor of the Fane of Flesh to mark where I was supposed to stand!" She made the familiar marks in the dust then pointed to similar carvings on the cavern walls.

Ratepe resisted. "All right, maybe this was the Phyrexian stronghold and the Thran attacked it, instead of the other way around. I mean, nobody really knows."

"I know! It says Gix, the silver-something, strong- something of the Thran. Of the Thran, Ratepe. If Urza could go back in time, he'd find Oix here waiting for him. That's what Gix meant! Waste not, want not, Ratepe. Gix was here seven thousand years ago! He wasn't lying, not completely. Those are Thran powerstones that you and Urza call the Mightstone and the Weakstone. The stones made the brothers what they were, Ratepe, and Gix might well have made the

stones!"

"The Phyrexians stole powerstones from the Thran?"

"You're not listening!" Xantcha waved her arms at a heavily carved wall. "It's all there. Two factions. Sheep and pigs, Red-Stripes and Shratta, Urza and Mishra, take your pick. 'The glory and destiny is compleation'compleation, the word, Ratepe, the exact angle-for-angle word that's carved on the doors of the Fane of Flesh. And there." She pointed at another section. " 'Life served, never weakened' and the word Thran, Rat, is the first glyph of the word for life." She recited them in Phyrexian, so he could hear the similarities, as strong as the similarities between their pronunciation of Koilos. "If language drifts in three thousand years, imagine what it could do in seven, once everyone's compleat and only newts have flesh cords in their throats."

The sun had slipped below the mountain tops. The marks, the words, were fading. Xantcha turned in Ratepe's arms to face him.

"He's been wrong. All this time-almost all his lifeUrza's been wrong. The Phyrexians never invaded Dominaria! There was no Phyrexia until Gix and the Ineffable left here. Winners, losers, I can't tell. We knew that. We spent over a thousand years looking for the world where the Phyrexians came from, so we could learn from those who defeated them .. . and all the time, it was Urza's own world."

Xantcha was shaking, sobbing. Ratepe tried to comfort her, but it was too soon.

"Urza would say to me, that's Phyrexian, that's abomination. Only the Thran way is the right way, the pure way. And I always thought to myself, the difference isn't that great. The Phyrexians aren't evil because they're compleat. They'd be evil no matter what they were, and those automata he was making, he was growing them in a jar. Is it right to grow gnats in a jar but not newts in a vat?"

Ratepe held her tight against his chest before she pulled away. "The Red-Stripes and the Shratta were both bad luck for everybody who crossed either one of them," he said gently. "And so were Urza and Mishra. Any time there's only one right way, ordinary people get crushed-maybe even the Morvernish and the Baszerati."

"But all our lives, Ratepe. All our lives, we've been chasing shadows! It's like someone reached inside and pulled everything out."

"You just said it: the Phyrexians are evil. Urza's crazed, but he's not evil, and he's the only one here who can beat the Phyrexians at their own game. We wanted to find the truth. Well, it wasn't what we expected, but we found a truth. And we've still got to go back to Urza. The truth here doesn't change that, does it?"

"We can't tell him. If he knew his Thran weren't the great and noble heroes of Dominaria ... If he knew that the Thran destroyed Mishra ..."

"You're right, but Mishra would laugh. I can hear him."

"I can't believe that."

"It's laugh or cry, Xantcha." Ratepe dried her tears. "If you've truly wasted three thousand years and you're stuck fighting a war that was stupid four thousand years before that, then either you laugh and keep going, or you

cry and give it up."