Planeswalker (3 page)

place, it had to be the very place, where the Phyrexians
had entered Domi-naria. There could be no doubt. Looking
straight ahead, past the lines and the exhausted
powerstones, there was a crystal reliquary atop a waist-
high pyramid. The reliquary was broken and empty, but the
pyramid presented an exquisitely painted scene to Urza's
glowing eyes: the demon he had seen in Tawnos's memory.

Circling the pyramid, Urza saw two other demonic
portraits and a picture of the chamber itself with a black
disk rising between the etched lines. He tore the chamber
apart, looking for the disk-either its substance or the
switch that awakened it- and not for the first time in his
life, Urza failed.

When Urza walked among the multiverse of planes, he
began his journey wherever he happened to be and ended it
with an act of will or memory. He realized that the
Phyrexians had used another way, but it lay beyond his
comprehension, as did the plane from which they'd sprung.
The multiverse was vast beyond measure and filled with
uncountable planes. With no trail or memory to guide him,
Urza was a sailor on a becalmed sea, beneath a clouded sky.
He had no notion which way to turn.

"I am immortal. I will wander the planes until I find
their home, however long and hard the journey, and I will
destroy them as they destroyed my brother."

"Nearly five years after Argoth was destroyed and the
war between the brothers had ended, Tawnos came to my
courtyard. He told me much that I had never known, much
that I have written here. He told me that my husband was
dead and that he'd died with my name on his lips. It is a
pretty thought, and I would like to believe it, but I am
not certain that Urza died and, if he did, he would have
died calling to Mishra, not me."

Xantcha lightly brushed her fingertips over brittle
vellum before closing her tooled-leather cover of The
Antiquity Wars. It was the oldest among her copies of Kayla
Bin-Kroog's epic history, and the scribe who'd copied and
translated it nearly twelve hundred years earlier claimed
he'd had Kayla's original manuscript in front of him.
Xantcha had her doubts, if not about the scribe's honesty,
then about his gullibility.

Not that either mattered. For a tale that had no heroes
and a very bitter ending, The Antiquity Wars had been very
carefully preserved for nearly three and a half millennia.
It was as if everyone still heeded the warning in Kayla's
opening lines: "Let this, the testament of Kayla Bin-Kroog,
the last of Yotia, serve as memory, so that our mistakes
will never be repeated."

Xantcha stared beyond the table. On a good night, the
window would have been open and she could have lost her
thoughts in the stars twinkling above the isolated cottage,
but Dominaria hadn't completely recovered from the
unnatural ice age had that followed the Brothers' War.
Clear nights were rare on Xantcha's side of the Ohran
Ridge, where the cottage was tucked into a crease of land,
where the grass ended and the naked mountains began. Mostly
the weather was cool or cold, damp or wet, or something in

between. Tonight, gusty winds were propelling needle-sharp
sleet against the shutters.

The room had cooled while she read. Her breath was mist
and, with a shivering sigh, Xantcha made her way to the
peat bin. There were no trees near the cottage. Her meager
garden sprouted a new crop of stones every spring, and the
crumbling clods that remained after she'd picked out the
stones were better suited for the brazier than for
nurturing grains and vegetables. She'd had to scrounge
distant forests for her table and shutters. Even now that
the cottage was finished, she spent much of her time
scrounging the remains of Terisiare for food and rumors.

Shredding a double handful of peat into the brazier
beneath the table, Xantcha found, as she often did, the
squishy remains of an acorn: a reminder of just how much
Urza and his brother had changed their world with their
war. When whole, the acorn would have been as large as her
fist, and the tree that had dropped it would have had a
trunk as broad as the cottage was wide. She crumbed the
acorn with the rest and stirred the coals until palpable
heat radiated from the iron bucket.

Xantcha forgot the table and hit her head hard as she
stood. She sat a moment, rubbing her scalp and muttering
curses, until she remembered the candlestick. With a louder
curse, she scrabbled to her feet. Waste not, want not, it
hadn't toppled. Her book was safe.

She returned to her stool and opened to a random page.
Kayla's portrait stared back at her: dusky, sloe-eyed, and
seductive. Xantcha owned four illustrated copies of The
Antiquity Wars. Each one depicted Kayla differently. Her
favorite showed Una's wife as a tall, graceful and
voluptuous woman with long blond hair, but

Xantcha knew none of the portraits were accurate.
Staring at the shutters, she tried to imagine the face of
the woman who had known, and perhaps loved, Urza the
Artificer while he was a mortal man.

One thing was certain, Xantcha didn't resemble Kayla
Bin-Kroog. There were no extravagant curves in Xantcha's
candlelit silhouette. She was short, not tall, and her hair
was a very drab brown, which she cropped raggedly around a
face that was more angular than attractive. Xantcha could,
and usually did, pass herself off as a slight youth
awaiting his full growth and first beard. Still, Xantcha
thought, she and Kayla would have been friends. Life had
forced many of the same hard lessons down their throats.

Kayla, however, wasn't the epic character who intrigued
Xantcha most. That honor went to Urza's brother, Mishra.
Three of Xantcha's illustrated volumes depicted Mishra as a
whip-lean man with hard eyes. The fourth portrayed him as
soft and lazy, like an overfed cat. Neither type matched
Kayla's word picture. To Kayla, Mishra had been tall and
powerful, with straight black hair worn wild and full.
Mishra's smile, his sister-by-law had written, was warm and
bright as the sun on Midsummer's day, and his eyes sparkled
with wit-when they weren't flashing full of suspicion.

Not all The Antiquity Wars in Xantcha's collection
included Kayla's almost indiscreet portrait of her
husband's brother. Some scribes had openly seized an
opportunity to take a moral stance, not only against
Mishra, but other men of more recent vintage- as if a

princess of ancient Yotia could have foreseen the vices of
the Samisar of Evean or Ninkin the Bold! One scribe,
writing in the year 2657 admitted that she'd omitted the
Mishra section entirely, because it was inconsistent with
Kayla's loyalty to her husband and, therefore, a likely
fraud-and absolutely inappropriate for the education of the
young prince, who was expected to learn his statecraft from
her copy of the epic.

Xantcha wondered if that priggish scribe had seen the
picture on her table. The Kayla Bin-Kroog of Xantcha's
oldest copy wore a veil, three pearl ropes, and very little
else. Few men could have resisted her allure. One of them
had been her husband. Beyond doubt, Urza had neglected his
wife. No woman had ever intrigued

Urza half as much as his artifacts. How many evenings
might Kayla have gone to bed railing at the fates who'd
sent the chaste Urza to her father's palace, rather than
his charming brother?

Urza had never questioned his wife's fidelity. At
least, Xantcha had never heard him raise that question.
Then again, the man who lived and worked on the other side
of the wall at Xantcha's back had never mentioned his son
or grandson, either.

With a sigh and a yawn, Xantcha stowed the book in a
chest that had no lock. They didn't need locks in the
absolute middle of nowhere. Urza had the power to protect
them from anything. The heavy lid served only to discourage
the mice that would otherwise have devoured the vellum.

"Xantcha!" Urza's voice came through the wall; as she
contemplated the precious library she'd accumulated over
the last two and a half centuries

She leapt instantly to her feet. The lid fell with a
bang. Urza had shut himself in his workroom while she'd
been off scrounging, and she'd known better than to
interrupt him when she'd returned. Sixteen days had passed
since she'd heard his voice.

Their cottage had two rooms: hers, which had begun as a
shed around an outdoor bread oven, and Urza's, which
consumed everything under the original roof, a dugout
cellar and a storage alcove-Urza traveled light but settled
deep. Each room had a door to a common porch whose thatched
roof provided some protection from the weather.

Wind-driven sleet pelted her as Xantcha darted down the
porch. She shoved the door shut behind her, then, when Urza
hadn't noticed the sound or draft, took his measure before
approaching him.

Urza the great artificer sat at a high table on a stool
identical to her own. By candlelight, Xantcha saw that he
was dressed in the same tattered blue tunic he'd been
wearing when she'd last seen him. His ash-blond hair spewed
from the thong meant to confine it at the nape of his neck.
It wasn't dirty-not the way her hair would have gotten foul
if it went that long between washings. Urza didn't sweat or
purge himself in any of the usual ways. He didn't breathe
when he was rapt in his studies and never needed to eat,
though he spoke in the mortal way and ate heartily
sometimes, if she'd cooked something that appealed to him.
He drank water, never caring where it came from or how long
it had stood stagnant, but the slops bucket beside his door
never needed emptying. Urza didn't get tired either, which

was a more serious problem because he remained man enough
to need sleep and dreams for the purging of his thoughts.

There were times when Xantcha believed that all Urza's
thoughts needed purging; this was one of them.

Mountains rose from Urza's table. All too familiar
mountains shaped from clay and crockery. Quicksilver
streams overflowed the corners. As melting sleet trickled
down her spine, Xantcha wondered if she could retreat and
pretend she hadn't heard. She judged that she could have,
but didn't.

"I've come," she announced in the language only she and
Urza spoke, rooted in ancient Argivian with a leavening of
Yotian and tidbits from a thousand other worlds.

Urza spun quickly on the stool, too quickly for her
eyes to follow his movement. Indeed, he hadn't moved, he'd
reshaped himself. It was never a good sign when Urza forgot
his body. Meeting his eyes confirmed Xantcha's suspicions.
They glowed with their own facet-rainbow light.

"You summoned me?"

He blinked and his eyes turned mortal, dark irises
within white sclera. But that was the illusion; the other
was real.

"Yes, yes! Come see, Xantcha. Look at what has been
revealed."

She'd sooner have entered the ninth sphere of Phyrexia.
Well, perhaps not the ninth sphere, but the seventh,
certainly.

"Come. Come! It's not like the last time."

At least he remembered the last time when the mountains
had exploded.

Xantcha crossed the narrows of the oblong room until
she stood at arm's length from the table. Contrary to his
assurance, it was like the last time, exactly like the last
time and the time before that. He'd recreated the plain of
the river Kor below the Kher Ridge and covered the plain
with gnats. She kept her distance.

"I'm no judge, Urza, but to my poor eyes it looks .. .
similar."

"You must get closer." He offered her a glass lens set
in an ivory ring.

It might have been seething poison for the enthusiasm
with which she took it. He offered her his stool. When that
didn't entice her, he grabbed her arm and pulled. Xantcha
clambered onto the stool and bent over the table with the
glass between her and the gnats.

Despite reluctance and reservation, Xantcha let out an
awed sigh; as an artificer, Una was incomparable. What had
appeared to be gnats were, as she had known they would be,
tiny automata, each perfectly formed and unique. In
addition to men and women, there were horses, their tails
swishing in imperceptible breezes, harnessed to minuscule
carts. She didn't doubt that each was surrounded by a cloud
of flies that the glass could not resolve. Nothing on the
table was alive. Urza was adamant that his artifacts
remained within what he called "the supreme principle of
the Thran." Artifacts were engines in service to life,
never life itself, and never, ever, sentient.

Bright tents pimpled Urza's table landscape. There were
even miniature reproductions of the artifacts he and his
brother had brought to the place and time that Kayla had

called "The Dawn of Fire."

Xantcha focused her attention on the automata. She
found Mishra's shiny dragon engine, a ground-bound
bumblebee among the gnats and Urza's delicate ornithopters.
When Xantcha saw an ornithopter spread its wings and rise
above the table, she was confident that she'd seen the
reason for Urza's summons. Miniaturizing those early
artifacts had been a greater challenge than creating the
swarms of tiny men and women who milled around them.

"You've got them flying!"

Urza pushed her aside. His eyes required no polished
glass assistance; he could most likely see the horseflies,
the fleas, and the worms as well. Xantcha noticed that he
was frowning.

"It's very good," she assured him, fearing that her
initial response hadn't been sincere enough.

"No, no! You were looking in the wrong place, Xantcha.
Look here-" He positioned her hands above the largest tent.
"What do you see now?"

"Blue cloth," she replied, knowing full well that
within the tent, automata representing Urza and the major
characters of Kayla's epic were midway through a scene
she'd observed many times before. At first she'd been
curious to see how Urza's script might differ from his
wife's, but not any more.

Urza muttered something-it was probably just as well
that Xantcha didn't quite catch it-and the blue cloth
became a shadow through which the automata could be clearly
seen. There was Urza, accurate down to the same blue shirt
and threadbare trousers. His master-student, Tawnos, stood
nearby, a half head taller than the rest. The Kroog
warlord, the Fallaji qadir and a score of others, all
moving as if they were alive and oblivious to the huge face
hovering overhead. Mishra was in the shadowed tent too, but
Urza was peculiar about his younger brother's gnat. While
all the others had mortal features, Mishra was never more
than wisps of metal at the qadir's side.

"Is it the second morning?" Xantcha asked. Urza was
breathing down her neck, expecting conversation. She hoped
he didn't intend to show her the assassinations. Suffering,
even of automata, repelled her.

Another grumble from Urza, then, "Look for Ashnod!"

According to The Antiquity Wars, auburn-haired Ashnod
wasn't at "The Dawn of Fire," but Urza always made a gnat
in her image. He'd put it on the table, where it did
nothing except get in the way of the others. To appease her
hovering companion, Xantcha moved the glass slightly and
found a red-capped dot in the shadow of another tent.