Planeswalker

CHAPTER 8

Xantcha guided the sphere with a rigid hand. The Glimmer Moon hung low in the night sky, painfully bright yet providing little illumination for the land below. A dark ridge loomed to the south. On the other side of that ridge there was a familiar cottage with two front doors and the bed in which she expected to be sleeping before midnight.

It was a clear night reminiscent of winter. The air was dead-calm and freezing within the sphere. Her feet had been quietly numb since sundown. Beside her, Rat hadn't said a word since the first stars appeared. She hoped he was asleep.

And perhaps he was, but he awoke when the sphere pitched forward and plummeted toward a black-mirror lake Xantcha hadn't noticed. He'd had nearly two weeks to learn when to tuck his head and keep his terror to himself, but in the dark, with food and whatnot tumbling around them, Xantcha didn't begrudge Rat a moment of panic. In truth, she scarcely noticed his shouts; the plunge caught her unprepared. It was several moments before she heard anything other than her own heart's pounding.

By then Rat had reclaimed his perch atop the sacks. "You could set us down for the night," he suggested.

"We're almost there."

"You said that at noon."

"It was true then, and it's truer now. We're almost to the cottage."

Rat made an unhappy noise in the back of his throat. Xantcha gave him a sidelong glance. Through the dim light she could see that he'd hunched down in his cloak and pulled the cowl up so it formed a funnel around his face.

She'd collected Rat's new clothes as she'd ferried Red- Stripe survivors to other Efuand villages. They were nothing like the clothes Mishra would have worn- nothing like the travel-worn silks and suedes Xantcha herself wore- but they were the best she'd been able to find, and Rat had seemed genuinely grateful for them.

He'd cleaned up better than Xantcha had dared hope. Their first full day in the ruined village, while she'd been talking relocation with the elders, Rat had persuaded one of the women to trim his hair. He'd procured a handful of pumice the same way and spent that afternoon scrubbing himself-and being scrubbed-in the stream-fed pool where the women did laundry.

"You didn't have to bother the villagers." Xantcha had told him when she'd seen him next, all pink and raw, especially on the chin. "I could have loaned you my knife."

He'd looked down at her, shaking his head and half- smiling. "When you're old enough to grow whiskers, Xantcha, you'll realize a man doesn't have to cut his own hair."

Xantcha had started to say that with or without whiskers Rat would never be as old as she was, but that half-smile had confused her. Even now, when she couldn't see through the dark or the cowl, she suspected he was half-smiling again, and she didn't know what to say. Once washed and dressed in clothes that didn't reek, he'd proved attractive, at least to the extent that Xantcha understood mortal handsomeness. Rat didn't resemble any of Xantcha's Antiquity Wars portraits, and there was a generosity to him that softened the otherwise hard lines of his face.

Rat had healed almost as fast as a newt. His bruises were shadows now, and the sores around his neck, wrists, and ankles shrank daily. Every morning had seen a bit more flesh on his bones, a bit more swagger in his stride. He'd become Mishra: charming, passionate, unpredictable, and vaguely dangerous. Kayla Bin-Kroog would have known what to say-Kayla had known what to say to Urza's brother-but Xantcha wasn't Urza's wife, and, anyway, Rat thought of her as a boy, a deception that, all other things considered, Xantcha thought she might continue after they returned to the cottage ... if Urza cooperated.

She touched his shoulder gingerly. "Don't worry, we'll be there tonight."

Rat shrugged her hand away. The cowl fell, and she could see his face faintly in the moonlight. He wasn't smiling. "Tonight or tomorrow morning, what difference can it make?"

"Urza's waiting. It's been more a month since I left. I've never been gone this long."

"You'll be gone forever if you don't stop pushing yourself. Even if he were the real Urza, he'd tell you to rest before you hurt yourself."

Rat didn't know Urza. Urza was inexhaustible, indestructible; he assumed Xantcha was too, and so, usually, did she.

"We're almost there. I'm not tired, and I don't need to rest." The words were no sooner said than the sphere caught another downdraft, not as precipitous as the first one, but enough to fling them against each other. "You're making mistakes."

"You know nothing about this!" Xantcha shot back. She

tilted her hand too far, overcorrected, and wound up in Rat's lap.

He pushed her away. "What more do I need to know? Put it down."

"I didn't argue with you when you said those villagers needed to be rescued."

"I'm not arguing with you. I know you want me to meet Urza. You think there's not a moment to lose against the Phyrexians, but not like this, Xantcha. This is foolish, as foolish as buying me in the first place, only I can't help you keep this damn thing in the air."

"Right-you can't help, so be quiet."

And he was, as quiet as he'd been that first night out of Medran. Xantcha hadn't believed it was possible, but Rat's silence was worse than Urza's, because Rat wasn't ignoring her. He wasn't frightened, either; just sitting beside her, a cold, blank wall even when she pushed the sphere against the wind. There were moments when she could believe that Rat was Urza's real brother.

"You don't have to be Mishra, not yet."

Another of Rat's annoyed, annoying noises. "I'm not being Mishra. Mishra wouldn't care if you killed yourself getting him to Urza and, if you asked me, the real Urza wouldn't either. The real Urza didn't care about anything except what he wanted. The way you're acting, I'm starting to think you believe what you've been telling me. It's all over your face, Xantcha. You're the one who's worried because you're afraid. More afraid of the man you call Urza, I think, than of any Phyrexian."

It was Xantcha's turn to stare at the black ridge on the southern horizon and convince herself that Rat was wrong. The ridge was beneath them before she broke the silence.

"You don't believe anything I've told you."

"It's pretty far-fetched."

"But you've come all this way with me. There were so many times, when I was ferrying the villagers about, that you could have run away, but you didn't. I thought you'd decided I was telling you the truth. Why did you stop trying to run away, if you didn't believe anything I said?"

"Because six months ago I would've sworn on my life that I'd never leave Efuan Pincar, not with some half-wit boy whose got a thing in his belly. I'd've sworn a lot of things six months ago, and I'd've been wrong about all of them. I'm getting used to being wrong and I did give you my word, freely, when you agreed to get those villagers to safety, that I'd play your game. You weren't paying attention, but I was. You saved them because I asked you to, and that makes you my friend, at least for now."

"You've got to believe, Rat. If you don't believe, Urza won't, and I don't know what he'll do-to either of us-if he thinks I've tried to deceive him."

"I'll worry about Urza the Artificer," Rat said wearily.

He was patronizing her, despite everything she'd told him. All the lessons in language and history she'd given to him after dark in the village, Rat didn't believe.

He continued, "You worry about that shadow coming up. I think it's another lake, and I think we're going to go rump over elbows again if you don't wriggle your hand around

it."

Rat was right about the lake. Xantcha wove her hand to one side, and another unpleasant moment was averted. It had taken her decades to learn the tricks that air could play on her sphere. Rat was quicker, cleverer than she'd ever been. There was a chance he was right about Urza, too, especially when she saw eldritch light leaking through the cottage windows after the sphere cleared the ridge.

"He's locked himself in," she muttered, unable to keep disappointment out of her voice.

"You didn't think he'd be waiting by the door, not in the middle of the night? A locked door isn't a bad idea, if you're alone and you've got the sorcery to make it stick. A man gets tired," said Rat.

"Not Urza," Xantcha said softly as the sphere touched down and collapsed.

Without the sphere's skin to support them, their supplies rearranged themselves across the ground. It was quicker than the chaos they endured when the sphere tumbled through the air, but quite a bit more painful on the hard ground; a wooden box corner came down squarely on Xantcha's cold ankle.

She was still cursing when the eldritch locks vanished. Urza appeared in the open doorway.

"Xantcha! Where have-?"

He'd noticed Rat. His eyes began to glow. Xantcha hadn't considered the possibility that Urza might simply kill any stranger who appeared outside his door.

"No!" Xantcha wanted to get herself between the two men, but her feet wouldn't cooperate. "Urza! Listen to me!"

She'd no sooner gotten Urza's attention than Rat wrested it away again with a single, soft-spoken word:

"Brother ..."

Every night in the village Xantcha had sat up with Rat telling him about Urza and Urza's obsessions. She'd warned him about Urza's uncanny eyes and the tabletop where his gnats recreated-refined-the scenes from Kayla's epic. She'd taught him the rudiments of the polyglot language she and Urza spoke when they were alone because it was rich in the words he'd shared with Mishra, when they were both men. She'd taught him the word for brother and insisted he practice it until he got it right, but the word he'd said was pure Efuand dialect.

For a moment the space between them was as dark as the space between the stars overhead, then the golden light that had been in the cottage flowed from Urza toward Rat, who didn't flinch as it surrounded him.

"You wished to see me, Brother," he continued in Efuand. "It's been a long, hard journey, but I've come back."

Urza could absorb a new language as easily as a plowed field absorbed the spring rains. Most of the time, he didn't notice the switch, but Xantcha had thought Urza might pay attention to Mishra's language, to the language that anyone pretending to be Mishra spoke during the critical first moments of their encounter. She was ready to kill Rat with her own hands, if Urza didn't do it for her. His eyes hadn't stopped glowing, and she'd seen those jewels obliterate creatures vastly more powerful than an overconfident slave from Efuan Pincar.

"Speak to me, Urza. It's been so long. We never finished our last conversation, never truly began it."

"Where?" Urza asked, a whisper on a cold, cold wind. At least he'd spoken Efuand.

"Before the blood-red tent of the warlord of Kroog. We stood as far apart as we stand now. You said we should remember that we were brothers."

"The tent was not red, and I said no such thing."

"Do you call me a liar, Brother? I remember less, Brother, but I remember very clearly. I have been here all the time, waiting for you; it would have been easier if your memory were not flawed."

Urza's eyes took on the painful brilliance of the Glimmer Moon. Xantcha was certain that Rat would sizzle like raindrops in a bonfire, yet the light didn't harm him, and after a few rib-thumping heartbeats she began to petceive Rat's unexpected brilliance. The real Mishra had been supremely confident and never, even in the best of times, willing to concede a point to his elder brother. Between Urza and Mishra, attitude was more important than language, and Rat had the right attitude.

"It is possible," Urza conceded as his eyes dimmed to a mortal color. "Each time I refine my automata, I learn what I had forgotten. It is a short step between forgotten and misremem-bered."

Raising his hand, Urza took a hesitant stride toward Rat- toward Mishra. He stopped short of touching his putative brother's flesh.

"I dreamed that in time, through time, I'd find a way to talk to you, to warn you of the dangers neither of us saw when we were alive together. I never dreamed that you would find me. You. It is you, Mishra?"

Urza moved without moving, placing his open hand across Rat's cheek. Even Xantcha, who knew Urza could change his shape faster than muscle could move bone, was stunned. As for Rat himself-Rat, who'd refused to believe her warnings that her Urza was the Urza who'd become more like a god than a man- he went deathly pale beneath Urza's long, elegant and essentially lifeless fingers. His eyes rolled, and his body slackened: he'd fainted, but Urza's curiosity kept him upright.

"They took your skin, Mishra, and stretched it over one of their abominations. Do you remember? Do you remember them coming for you? Do you remember dying?"

Rat's limp arms and legs began to tremble. Xantcha's breath caught in her throat. She'd never believed that Urza was cruel, merely careless. He'd lived so long in his own mad isolation that he'd forgotten the frailties of ordinary flesh, especially of flesh more ordinary than that of a Phyrexian newt. She was certain that once Urza noticed what was he was doing, he'd relent. He could heal as readily as he harmed.

But Urza didn't notice what he was doing to the youth she'd brought from Efuan Pincar. Rat writhed like a stuck serpent. Blood seeped from his nose. Xantcha threw herself into the golden light.

"Stop!" Xantcha seized Urza's outstretched arm. She might have been a fly on a mountain top for the effect she had. "You're killing him."

Suddenly, Urza's arm hung at his side again. Xantcha

reeled backward, fighting for balance while Rat collapsed.

"There is nothing in his mind. I sought the answers that have eluded me: when did the Phyrexians come for him? Did he fight? Did he surrender willingly? Did he call my name? He has no answers, Xantcha. He has nothing at all. My brother's mind is as empty as yours. I do not understand. I found you too late; the damage had already been done. But how and why has Mishra come back to me if he is not himself, if his mind is not alive with the thoughts I know should be there."

Xantcha knew her mind was empty. She was Phyrexian, a newt engendered in a vat of turgid slime. She had no imagination, no great thoughts or ambitions, not even a heart that could be crushed by humiliation, whether that humiliation came from Urza or Oix.

Rat was another matter. He lay face-down in a heap of awkwardly bent limbs. "He's a man," Xantcha snarled. She'd caught her balance, but kept her distance. Another step closer and she'd be a child looking up to meet Urza's eyes. She was too angry for that. "His mind is his own. It's not a book for you to read and cast aside!"

Xantcha couldn't guess whether Rat was still alive, even when Urza put his foot against the youth's flank to shove him onto his back.

"This is only the first. There will be others. The first is never final; there must always be refinements. If I have learned nothing else, I have learned that. I was working in the wrong direction- thinking that I'd have to reach back through time to find Mishra and the truth. And because I was not looking for Mishra, he could not find me, not as he must find me. But his truth will come to me once I have refined the path. I can see them, Xantcha: a line of Mishras, each bearing a piece of the truth. They will come and come until one of them bears it all." Urza headed to his open door. "There is no time." He stopped and laughed aloud. "Time, Xantcha ... think of it! I have finally found the way to negate time. I will start again. Do not disturb me."

He was mad, Xantcha reminded herself, and she'd been a fool to think she could outwit him. Unlike Rat, Urza never changed his mind. He interpreted everything through the prism of his obsessions. Urza couldn't be held responsible for what had happened.

That burden fell on her.

Xantcha had never kept count of those she'd slain or watched die. Surely there were hundreds ... thousands, if she included Phyrexians, but she'd never betrayed anyone as she'd betrayed Ratepe, son of Mideah. She knelt beside him, straightening his corpse, starting with his legs. Ratepe hadn't begun to stiffen; his skin was still warm.

"There will be no others!" Urza turned around. "What did you say?" "I said, this was a man, Urza. He was a man, born and living until you killed him. He wasn't an artifact on your table that you could sweep onto the floor when you were finished with him. You didn't make him-" She hesitated. Burdened with guilt, she saw that her clever plan to have Ratepe pose as Mishra required confession. "That tabletop didn't reach through the past. I went looking for a man who resembled your brother, I found him, and I brought him here.

"I won't do it again, so there won't-"

"You, Xantcha? Don't speak nonsense. This was my brother- the first shadow of my brother. You could not have found him without me."

"I'm not speaking nonsense! You had nothing to do with this, Urza. This was my idea, my bad idea. His name was never Mishra. His name was Ratepe, son of Mideah. I bought him from a slaver in Efuan Pincar."

Urza appeared thunderstruck. Xantcha leaned forward to straighten Ratepe's other leg. Efuands buried their dead in grass-lined graves that faced the sunrise. She'd helped dig several of them. There was a suitable spot not far from her window where she'd see it easily and lament her folly each time she did.

Unless she left ... soared back to Efuan Pincar to do battle with the Phyrexians in Ratepe's name. If the cyst would still respond to her whims. If Urza didn't destroy her when his thoughts finally made their way back to the world of life and death.

She reached for Ratepe's crooked arm.

"A slaver? You sought my brother's avatar in a slaver's pens?"

Avatar-a spirit captured in flesh. Xantcha recognized the word but had never consciously used it; it was the right word, though, for what she'd wanted Ratepe to become. "Yes." She straightened Ratepe's elbow. "Mishra was a Fallaji slave."

"Mishra was advisor to the qadir."

"Mishra was a slave. The Fallaji captured him before you got to Yotia; they never freed him-not formally. It's in The Antiquity Wars. He told Kayla, and she wrote down his words."

Xantcha had never told Urza about her chest filled with copies of his wife's epic. He hadn't asked, hadn't volunteered any sense of his past here in his home, except what arose from his tabletop artifacts. He didn't appear pleased to hear Kayla's name falling off her tongue. Xantcha sensed she was living dangerously, very dangerously.

She took Ratepe's hand. It was stiff; rigor had begun. Gently, she uncurled his fingers.

They resisted, tightened, squeezed.

Before she could think, Xantcha jerked her hand away-or tried to. Ratepe didn't let go, and she stayed where she was, kneeling beside him, breathless with shock. She looked down. He winked, then kept both eyes shut.

"Waste not, want not," she whispered and cast her glance quickly in Una's direction but Urza was elsewhere.

"I did not tell you to read that story." His voice came from a cold place, far from his heart. "Kayla Bin-Kroog never knew the truth and did not write it, either. She chose to live in a mist, with neither light nor shadow to guide her. You cannot believe anything in The Antiquity Wars, Xantcha, especially about Mishra. My wife saw her world through a veil of emotions. She saw people, not patterns, and when she saw my brother ..." He didn't finish his thought, but offered another: "She didn't mean to betray me. I'm sure she thought she could be the bridge between us; it was too late. I honored Harbin, but after that, it was all lies between us. I couldn't trust her. You

can't either."

Before Xantcha could say that Kayla's version of the war made more sense, Ratepe sat bolt upright.

"I've heard it said that there's no way a man can be absolutely certain that his wife's child is his and only one way he can be cer-tain that it's not. Kayla Bin-Kroog was an attractive woman, Urza, and wiser than you'll know. She did try to become a bridge, but not with her body. She was tempted. I made certain she was tempted, but she never succumbed, which, my Brother, begs one almighty question: How and why are you so certain Harbin was not your son?"

Suddenly, they were all in darkness as Urza's golden light vanished.

"You've done it now," Xantcha said softly and with more than a little admiration. She'd never gotten the better of Urza that way. "He's gone 'walking."

But Urza hadn't 'walked away, and when the light returned it flowed from an Urza that Xantcha had never seen before: a youthful Urza, dressed in a dirt-laborer's dusty clothes and smiling as he reached out to take Ratepe's hands.

"I have missed you, Brother. I've had no one to talk to. Stand up, stand up! Come with me! Let me show you what I've learned while you were gone. It was Ashnod, you know-"

Ratepe proved he was as consistent as he was reckless. He folded his arms across his chest and stayed where he was. "You've had Xantcha. He's not 'no one.' "

"Xantcha!"

While Urza laughed, Xantcha got to her feet.

"Xantcha! I rescued Xantcha a thousand years ago-no, longer than that, more than three thousand years ago. Don't be fooled by appearances, as I was. She's Phyrexian-cooked up in one of their vats. A mistake. A failure. A slave. They were getting ready to bury her when I came along; thought she was Argivian at first. She's loyal ... to me. She's got her own reasons for turning on Phyrexia. But her mind is limited. You can talk to her, but only a fool would listen."

Xantcha couldn't meet Ratepe's eyes. When they were alone and Urza belittled her, she could blame it on his madness. Now there were three of them standing outside the cottage. Urza wasn't talking to her, he was talking about her, and there were no excuses. All their centuries together, all the experiences no one else had shared, and he'd never conquered his distrust, his disdain.

"I think-" Ratepe began, and Xantcha forced herself to catch his attention.

She mouthed the single word, Don't. It didn't matter what Urza thought of her, so long as he stopped playing with his tabletop gnats. Xantcha mouthed a second word, Phyrexia, and made a fist where Ratepe could see it. She hoped she'd told him what mattered, and that it wasn't her.

Ratepe cleared his throat. He said, "I think it is not the time to argue, Urza," and made the words sound sincere. "We have always done too much of that. I always did too much of that. There, I've admitted it, and the world did not end. Not yet; not again. You think we made our fatal mistake on the Plains of Kor. I think we made it earlier. After so long, it doesn't matter, does it? It was the same mistake either way. We couldn't talk, we could only

compete. And you won. I see the Weakstone in your left eye.

Have you ever heard it singing to you, Urza?"

Sing?

Anyone who'd read The Antiquity Wars would know that Urza's eyes had once been his Mightstone and his brother's Weakstone. Tawnos had brought that scrap back to Kayla. Ratepe claimed he'd read Kayla's epic several times, and between two stones and two eyes, he could have made a lucky guess. The Weakstone had, indeed, become Urza's left eye. But sing? Urza had never mentioned singing.

Xantcha couldn't guess what had fired Ratepe's all-toomortal imagination, but as Urza frowned and stared at the stars, she guessed it had propelled him too far.

Then Urza began to speak. "I hear it now, faintly, without word, but a song of sadness. Your song?"

Xantcha was stunned.

Urza continued: "The stone we found-the single stone- was a weapon, you know: The final defense of the Thran, their last sacrifice. They blocked the portal to Phyrexia. You and I, when we sundered the stone, we opened the portal. We let them back into Dominaria. I never asked you what you saw that day."

Ratepe grinned. "Didn't I say that we made our mistake much earlier?"

Urza clapped his hands together and laughed heartily. "You did! Yes, you did! We've got a second chance, brother. This time, we'll talk." He opened his arms, gesturing toward the open doorway. "Come, let me show you what I've learned while you were gone. Let me show you the wonders of artifice, pure artifice, Brother-none of those Phyrexian abominations. And Ashnod! Wait until I show you Ashnod: a viper at your breast, Brother. She was their first conquest, your biggest mistake."

"Show me everything," Ratepe said, walking into Urza's embrace. "Then we'll talk."

Arm in arm, they walked toward the cottage. A few steps short of the threshold, Ratepe shot a glance over his shoulder. He seemed to expect some gesture from her, but Xantcha, unable to guess what it should be, simply stood with her arms limp at her sides.

"And when we're done talking, Urza, we'll listen to Xantcha."

The door shut without a sound. The light was gone, and Xantcha was left with only moonlight to help her haul the food supplies.