Planeswalker (41 page)

Could Gix have ordered a search that had removed her
handiwork? The Phyrexian presence in Avohir's temple had
been noticeably less tainted with the glistening oil scent
when Xantcha had made her second visit to Pincar City and
all but absent this past afternoon.

But if the demon had scoured the temple walls, wouldn't
he have checked the Red-Stripe barracks, too, or the plaza
itself? Were compleat Phyrexians truly lacking in
suspicious imagination?

There was a flurry around the dais. The holy readers
were no longer reciting, and other priests had joined them,
getting in one another's way as they closed the great book

and made haste to get the litter poles beneath it. That
would explain Ratepe's distress. He didn't want Avohir's
book inside the sanctuary when-if-the altar collapsed.

But there was more she should worry about: Red-Stripes
cadres had spilled from the barracks and the temple. They
began, ruthlessly, to restore order in the swirling crowd.
Their only opposition came from those other Red-Stripes
who'd turned on the disabled sleepers when the spiders
began to scream. It seemed that some sleepers and
Phyrexians hadn't been affected by Urza's artifacts or,
even more incredibly, that some Efuands had so embraced
Phyrexian aspirations that they pursued them even after the
Phyrexians had fallen.

Xantcha grabbed Ratepe's sleeve and made him face her.

"What's happening down there?" she demanded. "Is it
over? Can I unplug my ears?"

He shrugged helplessly and, consumed by frustration,
Xantcha stuck a finger in one ear.

The spiders hadn't stopped screaming, and breaking the
seal that protected her from their power was an instant,
terrible mistake. Xantcha lost all awareness and sense of
herself until she was on her back. Ratepe knelt over her,
pressing his fingers against her ears. One hand was bloody
when she felt strong enough to push them both away. Ratepe
helped her stand.

The situation had changed in the plaza. Some of the
second wave of Red-Stripes had succumbed to the spiders'
screaming. They were literally torn apart by the Efuand
mob, and gruesome though that was to watch, it was also
instructive. The resistant Red-Stripes were more compleat
than Xantcha or the already fallen sleepers. Beneath their
seemingly mortal skins they had bones of metal, wired
sinews, and veins that spilled glistening oil onto the
cobblestones.

The oil did truly glisten in malevolent shades of green
and purple until someone discovered, as Urza had discovered
a very long time ago, that glistening oil burned.

A slow-moving question that was not her own passed
through Xantcha's mind, and Ratepe's, too-he staggered and
might have fallen from the roof, if Xantcha hadn't grabbed
him. Across the plaza, most Efuands were not so fortunate,
though they had less far to fall. All whom Xantcha could
see shook themselves back to their senses and stood up
unharmed. None of the Efuands, including Ratepe, could know
what had happened, but Xantcha, who knew a demon's touch
when she felt it, looked for a strand of ruby red light and
found it sweeping through the smoke above the burning oil.

Gix.

Xantcha's hand rose to her throat. She broke the
crystal. Ratepe watched her do it; he asked questions she
couldn't hear, and she answered with the demon's name.

Avohir's sweet mercy! She read the prayer from Ratepe's
lips.

In the plaza, the frantic priests of Avohir had finally
slung the litter poles beneath the holy book in position to
carry the volume back to the sanctuary. That building had
still to show any signs of damage from the shatter'Spiders.
The sanctuary might not show such damage to observers on
the guild-inn roof. They hadn't expected or intended to
bring the great outer walls down, merely the altar and a

dormitory cloister behind the sanctuary. And, of course,
the spiral stairway down to the crypt.

Xantcha didn't know whether to relax or ratchet her
apprehension tighter when the priests successfully
navigated through the plaza throng, and Avohir's holy book
disappeared into the sanctuary. Ratepe was obviously more
anxious, but his lips moved too quickly for her to read his
words, even after she'd asked him to slow down and speak
distinctly.

Then something happened to make Ratepe put his hands
over his ears. All across the plaza, Efuands hitherto
unaffected were reacting to a painful noise, but there were
no Red-Stripes-no Phyrexians-to take advantage of them. All
of them, sleepers and compleat, those already dead and
those still alive, simply exploded, bursting like sun-
ripened corpses. Sound, as Urza had promised, with the
power to shake glistening oil until it pulled apart. The
Glimmer Moon had struck its zenith. Everything until that
moment had been mere forewarning.

Xantcha's whole body tingled from the inside out. If
Urza's armor failed, she'd be dead before she knew she was
endangered. She tried to imagine the scenes in all the
other cities where she and Urza had planted the spiders.
Born Dominarians on their knees, as Ratepe was, perhaps
spattered with blood that glistened malevolently in the
moonlight. All of them wondering if it were their turn to
die.

The Red-Stripe barracks collapsed and, through her
feet, Xantcha heard the ground wail. A cloud of dust as
large as the guild inn billowed through sanctuary doors, a
cloud that rose quickly to hide the temple and half the
plaza from Xantcha's view. When dust had settled some, she
and every Efuand saw that the great dome above the altar
and the gong tower-shadows in the night moments earlier-
were both missing.

From his knees, Ratepe lowered his hands and pounded
the roof with his fists. A god who couldn't protect his
book or his sanctuary was apt to lose the faith of his
worshipers. Xantcha didn't know the depth of Ratepe's
faith, but she guessed it had been shaken to its roots.

It was shaken further when an intense red glow filled
Avohir's sanctuary, overflowing through the open doors, the
windows, and the roof. Xantcha saw the wotd fire on
Ratepe's lips, but the light wasn't fire. It was Gix.

Xantcha broke the chain that had held Urza's pendant
around her neck. She held the crystal up in the crimson
light. Very clearly, it was broken and, just as clearly,
Urza wasn't coming. He hadn't said where he'd go to watch
the Glimmer Moon strike its zenith. He could have gone to
the Glimmer Moon itself or he could have remained in the
Ohran Ridge cottage.

Or Urza's absence could mean that Gix was not the only
demon on Dominarian soil and that Urza was already in a
desperate brawl. Urza could 'walk anywhere, but even he
couldn't be in two places at once.

The red light within Avohir's sanctuary grew brighter,
larger. It fluctuated and emitted serpentine flares that
faded slowly in the night. The smell of Phyrexia grew
steadily stronger. Xantcha imagined Gix burning and
battering his way up from the catacombs. She wondered if he

had the power to destroy a city and didn't doubt for a
heartbeat that the demon would, if he could.

There was nothing Xantcha could do to stop Gix, and
until she was sure that the spiders were exhausted, there
was nothing she dared do to spirit herself and Ratepe away.

Vast crimson fingers leapt from the roofless sanctuary.
They soared into the sky, then arched toward the plaza.
Looking up, Xantcha and everyone else saw that the fingers
were hollow, filled with darkness and fanged like serpents.
The darkness resembled the upright passageway to Phyrexia
that she'd seen in the crypt. Xantcha feared they'd all be
sucked into the Fourth Sphere. Ratepe put his arms around
her, and Xantcha wrapped hers around him. She wanted to
feel his warm, mortal flesh with her fingers and wouldn't
have cared if the spiders killed her, except that she
wouldn't force Ratepe to watch her die.

She saw a ribbon of silvery light emerge from the
center of palace. Diving and soaring, the palace light
pierced each serpent and drew them all together with a
choking knot before dragging them over the north wall and
out to sea.

Xantcha shouted, "Urza!" at Ratepe who needed a few
more heartbeats before he could shape his lips around the
name.

Gix fought back, but as Xantcha had always suspected,
Urza was more than a match for a Phyrexian demon ... or a
Thran one. Neither duelist was visible from the plaza or
the roof, though they each knew exactly where the other
was. They fought with light and fire, with artifacts and
creatures that defied naming in any language Xantcha knew.
Gix would have lost quickly if the demon had not aimed most
of his destruction at the Efuand survivors in the plaza and
thereby forced Urza to defend the innocent.

Then Urza loosed two weapons at once: bolts of
lightning to counter Gix's last cowardly thrust and a
dragon shaped like the one he'd ridden into Phyrexia, but
shaped from golden light. Stars shone through the dragon's
wings, but its power was anything but illusory. A jet of
intense blue fire shot from its mouth as it began a stoop
that would take it into Gix's sanctuary lair.

Gix didn't die fighting; nor did he retreat to
Phyrexia. Instead he abandoned Pincar City altogether: a
relatively small green-gold streak racing to the south, a
half-breath ahead of the dragon's flame.

Xantcha expected the dragon to pursue Gix over the
horizon, but it continued its stoop into the ruined
sanctuary. She braced herself for the physical shock wave
of a crash that never came. A heartbeat, and another, and
the dragon lifted into flight again, showing first its
wings, then its spidery torso, and at last, clasped in a
pair of legs, a book that recently had seemed very large
and now looked quite small. The dragon beat its translucent
wings twice for altitude. Then it stooped again and set
Avohir's holy book on the battered dais before climbing
back into the sky.

The dragon circled out to sea-Avohir's home according
to myth-and the Efuands still standing, including Ratepe,
set up a cheer in its wake, but Urza wasn't finished. He
brought the dragon back (Xantcha would have sworn he shrank
it just a bit, too) for a gentle glide over the palace

roofs. Through its bright, shifting light, Xantcha wasn't
sure it had picked something up until it was almost
overhead and she could see a frail old man getting the ride
of his life.

It was a miracle of another sort that Tabarna's heart
didn't fail before the dragon set him down beside Avohir's
book. The dragon flew straight up after that and
disappeared among the stars.

The Efuands who'd cheered the survival of their book,
went wild when they saw their king. Xantcha couldn't get
Ratepe's attention no matter how hard she pounded his back
or how loudly she shouted, "Is it over? Can I release
Urza's armor?"

Yes, it's over, Xantcha. Urza's voice spoke to
Xantcha's thoughts.

You heard! she replied, releasing the armor and pulling
the wax out of her ears. You came! The cheers of the crowd,
after total silence, were as deafening as the spiders.

Xantcha had trouble hearing Urza when he said, still in
her mind, I've been here all along, keeping my eyes on Gix.
I didn't want to frighten you.

Waste not, want not. How long had Urza known?

Xantcha hadn't kept her thoughts private. Urza pulled
the question from her mind and answered it. Since the
priest in the orchard. I went back to all the haunted
places. I saw how the Phyrexi-ans had crept into my world
again. I found Tabama in a ceil beneath the palace-he was
quite mad, but still himself. The Phyrexians needed to trot
him out periodically, and they could only do what they did
to Mishra because he carried the Weakstone. So I stole
Tabarna from them and hid him on another plane.

That, I confess, was the act that brought Gix here to
Pincar City. Since then, everything I've done-everything
I've had you do-has been building toward this moment. I
healed Tabama. Madness, you know, sinks deep roots in a
man's soul once he's seen sights and thought thoughts no
man should see or think. There are some moments he'll never
remember again, moments such as I wish I could forget,
Xantcha. The Shratta could not be deceived, so they were
killed while Tabama watched. But he'll live another ten
years and sire another son or two. I guarantee it.

Xantcha had warned her slave, assume that if you've
thought about it Urza knows it. Then she had failed to
remember her own advice.

"You've had reason to be suspicious, Xantcha. There's
never been anyone who could do for me what I've done for
Tabarna."

Urza was on the roof with them, looking very ordinary.
He had no trouble getting Ratepe's attention but was
unprepared when Ratepe threw himself into a joyous, tearful
embrace.

The affection Efuands had for their elderly king-whose
speech none of them could hope to hear through their
shouting- was nothing Xantcha wanted to understand, though
it was also clear that Urza had done exactly what was
necessary to insure that the realm would recover from its
long battering.

Xantcha stood a bit apart from Ratepe and Urza, giving
herself a few moments to consider all that she'd just
learned. She stayed apart when Urza extended his hand.

"What happens next?" she demanded thinking deliberately
of Gix.

"I go to Koilos."

She folded her arms. "Not alone. Not if you're going
after Gix."

Urza frowned, then sighed. "No, I suppose not." He
turned to Ratepe. "And you, Brother, I suppose you'll want
to come, too."

The sun just had risen over the Kher Ridge, far to the
east of Gulmany island and Efuan Pincar. It would be a
summer day with clear air and high clouds that wouldn't
come close to raining on these desert-dry stones. Koilos,
the Secret Heart, was on the other side of the mountain
where Xantcha and Ratepe rested, waiting for Ratepe to
recover from the three-step 'walk from Pincar City. Urza
was already at the cavern. He'd sworn he wouldn't go
looking for Gix until they arrived, unless Gix came looking
for him.

Ratepe sat on the ground, chafing his arms and legs
against the morning chill and the shock of healing.

"You think he knows everything?"

Xantcha had just finished telling him what had passed
between her and Urza on the guild-inn roof not an hour
earlier. She was impatient to yawn out the sphere and get
into the air, even though she knew there'd be no part for
her or Ratepe to play in the coming fight. More than three
thousand years ago she'd watched as other demons thrust Gix
down a fumarole to punishment that had proved less than
eternal. She expected Urza to do a better job and wanted to
watch him doing it.

"He's still calling you Mishra."

Ratepe nodded several times. "True enough. But he was
something in the sky last night over Pincar City-a little
while ago- whenever. I got used to the idea that he was the
crazed, foolish man who lived on the other side of the
wall. I let myself forget what I knew he was, through the
Weakstone. He was the man who came within an hour of
destroying the world."

"You weren't the only one," Xantcha confessed. "You
ready to finish this?"

"All in a morning's work," Ratepe joked grimly as he
stood. "Avohir's mercy, I should be happy. I am happy, but
inside, I feel like I felt after I saw my father dead, or
when we were falling through that storm over the ocean and
we were floating in your sphere. I don't feel a part of
anything that's around me. If I ask myself what happens
next, there's nothing there, not even a sunrise."

Xantcha replied, "Urza 'walked us under the sun. That's
why we missed the sunrise, and I'll try not to drop the
sphere through a storm again.'' She left Ratepe's other
observations behind on the ground as the sphere flowed
around them and lifted them into the air.

Urza waited not far from the place where Xantcha had
read the Thran glyphs. He was taller than any mortal man
and clad in his full panoply with robes armored in the
colors of sorcery. His hand circled the gnarled wood of a
war staff capped with a peculiar blue-gray metal. His eyes

were hard and faceted, as if he'd see nothing so puny as
flesh, but his voice was strong and vibrant when he greeted
them.

"Gix is here, waiting for me."

The scents of Phyrexia were indeed in the air:
glistening oil, Fourth Sphere fumes, and the malevolence
Xantcha recognized as Gix. She yawned out her armor while
Urza laid hands on Ratepe's shoulders. The young Efuand
glowed like swamp water once they entered the cavern.
Sunlight ended ten paces into the upper, glyph-covered
chamber. Urza's war staff emitted a steady light from the
edges of its many blades. The light reached to the glyph-
covered walls.

"Phyrexian, you say?" Urza asked.

"Close enough. Do you want to read them through my
eyes?"

"Not yet. After. I've waited too long to taste
vengeance against the Phyrexian who destroyed my brother.
It's hard enough to know that Gix is one of the Thran, one
of the ones who got away, I don't want to know the rest,
not yet. And once I know it, then I'll decide if it's worth
remembering. I have much to do, Xantcha. I cannot always
embrace the truths that might be written on stone walls. I
know that's been hard for you, but it's been even harder
for me."

The ultimate confession from the crazed and foolish man
who lived on the other side of the wall?

They continued to the rear of the chamber, where Ratepe
had spotted a passage. Without torches or powerstone eyes,
he had been unable to explore it. The passage sloped
steeply downward and was marred by deep gouges in the
stone. Xantcha walked on Urza's left, a half-pace behind.
Ratepe held a similar place on Urza's right.

"We took everything," Ratepe whispered, softly, but in
Koilos a whisper carried like a shout. Urza didn't tell him
to be quiet, so Ratepe continued. "The chamber below, where
we found the stones, we stripped it bare. We needed the
metal. At the end we were so desperate for metal, any
metal, that we opened tombs and took the grave goods from
our dead and fueled our smelters with their bones."

"So did we," Urza assured him. "So did we."

Xantcha saw light ahead, the harsh, gray light of
Phyrexia.

The second chamber of Koilos was as large as the first
and empty, except for Gix who stood somewhat behind dead
center. Xantcha expected some preliminary taunting and
boasting, but neither Urza nor Gix was a young mortal with
an itch for glory. They'd come to kill or be killed. All
their whys had been buried long ago.

Gix attacked first as they emerged from the passageway.
He didn't waste time or effort with side attacks against
Xantcha or Ratepe. They weren't innocents with rights to
Urza's protection. They'd come of their own free will, and
they'd be meat, at best, if Urza failed to win.

The rubine gem in the demon's bulging forehead shone
bright. A thumbnail-sized spot of the same color appeared
on Urza's breast. Heartbeats later, a boulder, Urza high
and Urza wide, bilious green and glassy, stood where Urza
had stood between Xantcha and Ratepe. The boulder blew
apart an instant later. Fists of stone hammered Xantcha

from face to toes and threw her back against the chamber
wall. Ratepe was on the floor, covered in a thick layer of
dust. Two counterspinning coils of fire and light whirled
around the demon until he spread his arms to vanquish them.

An ambulator took shape, closer to Urza than to Oix.
The ambulator heaved and rotated upward, sprouting a toothy
hole of a mouth and many viscous, reaching arms. An arm
came close enough to Xantcha that she judged it prudent to
put a little distance between herself and the duel. She
scuttled crabwise along the curving chamber wall and was
relieved to see Ratepe do the same on the other side.

Urza spoke a word, and the ambulator-creature became a
sooty smear. He did nothing at all that Xantcha could see,
and yet Gix was slammed against the chamber's far wall. A
crystal sarcophagus surrounded the demon. Xantcha thought
that might be the end, but purple fumes rose from the
crystal, and Urza disappeared as manic wailing filled the
barren chamber. Gix shook off the dissolving crystal and
clambered to his metallic feet.

Xantcha took heart from the fact that the demon wasn't
claiming victory by targeting her or Ratepe. His oddly
shaped head swiveled frantically. The rubine light danced
over the naked stone, leaving a trail of smoke as Gix
sought a target. Twice the demon blew futile craters in the
rock, but he was ready when ghostly blue arms seized him
from behind. Urza landed on his back in the middle of the
chamber. The impact shook jagged stones the size of a man's
torso from the ceiling.

Both combatants righted themselves and backed away from
each other.

The testing phase was over; the duel began in earnest
with flurries of attacks that ebbed and flowed too fast for
Xantcha's eyes. The demon was stronger, cleverer, and much
more resilient than she'd believed after seeing him flee
the dragon in Pincar City. She thought of the excoriation.
It had taken a clutch of demons to wrestle Gix into that
fumarole. She suspected that he was the only one who'd
survived.

Urza succeeded in melting away one of Gix's legs,
though that was little more than inconvenience in a battle
that wasn't about physical injury. And though Urza seemed
to have the advantage more often than not, he couldn't
deliver a killing attack. Not that he didn't try a in a
hundred different ways from elemental ice to conjured
beasts and the ghosts of artifacts he and Mishra had
wielded against each other. Gix countered them all,
sometimes barely, with an equally bewildering assortment of
arcane memories and devices.

Eventually, when it had become apparent that neither
flash nor guile was going tilt the balance, Urza and Gix
locked themselves in a contest of pure will that manifested
itself in an increasingly complex web of blue-white and
crimson light. The spindle-shaped web stretched between
Urza's eyes and Gix's gem-studded forehead. At its widest,
which was also its middle and the middle of the chamber,
the web did not descend to the floor. Sparing nothing for
effect, the web gave off neither heat nor sound and
endured, without really changing, until Xantcha had to
breathe again.

How long, she asked herself, could they remain enrapt

in each other? Her best answer: for a very long time. She
got up on her feet.

"Look at Urza's eyes!" Ratepe shouted from the other
side of the chamber.

Xantcha had to walk closer than she considered wise
before she found a slit in the web that let her look down
the spindle to Urza's face. She didn't see anything
strange-nothing stranger than two specks as bright as the
sun-but she didn't have Ratepe's rapport with the
Weakstone. And, as Ratepe's voice had seemed to have no
effect on the duel, she asked, "What am I looking for?"

"You can't see everything changing ... coming back
from the past, or going back to it?"

She started to say that she couldn't see anything
changing and swallowed the words. Shadows were growing in
the Koilos chamber. Not shadows cast by the web's light,
but shadows cast by time, growing more substantial as each
moment passed. Metal columns grew along the walls. Great
machines, worthy of Phyrexia, loomed up from the floor.

Beneath the widest part of the light-woven spindle a
low platform came into being. Mirrors sprang up in a circle
behind both Gix and Urza, behind Xantcha and Ratepe, as
well. An object similar to Avohir's great book, but made
from metal like Urza's staff, grew atop the platform. As
Xantcha watched, Phyrexian glyphs formed on the smooth
metal leaves.

Xantcha was waiting for those glyphs to become legible
when dull-colored metal sprang out of the central platform.
The metal shaped itself into four rising prongs, like
uplifted hands.

"His eyes, Xantcha! His eyes! They're going back. Gix
is dragging them back through time!"

The Weakstone and the Mightstone had pulled out of
Urza's skull and were advancing through the spindle. Gix
had said, The Thran are waiting.... And when the
powerstones merged into the prongs, Urza would be in the
hands of the Thran. Ratepe shouted, "We can stop them."
"No." "We can!"

"Not if you're getting influence from the Weakstone.
It's Thran. It belongs to Gix. No wonder he was waiting
here." Xantcha would have sobbed, if the armor had let her.

"We can stop this, Xantcha. Gix is sending the
powerstones into the past. All we have to do is get there
first."

Xantcha shook her head-never mind that she couldn't see
Ratepe. "That's the Weakstone influencing you," she
shouted. "Gix. Phyrexia." Her gut said anything she did
would only make things worse, if anything could be worse
than watching Urza become a tool of the Phyrexian Thran.
She was paralyzed, frightened as she had never been before-
except, perhaps, at the very beginning when the vat-priests
told the newts Listen, and obey. "Meet me in the light,
Xantcha!"

On the other side of the spindle, Ratepe thrust his
hands into the web. From Xantcha's side, looking into the
spindle, his flesh had become transparent and his bones
gleamed with golden light.

"Now, Xantcha!"

The powerstones had traveled half the distance to the
prongs. The etched-metal glyphs were legible, if she could

have concentrated and read them. She walked to the right
place, the place opposite Ratepe, then hugged herself
tightly, tucking her hands beneath her arms, lest she move
without thinking.

"I need to be sure!" she shouted.

"Be sure that Gix wants the Weakstone and Mightstone,
not you and me. At least we can give him what he doesn't
want. It's all we've got to give."

Xantcha reached for the spindle. The light repelled
Urza's armor. A good omen or a bad one? For whom? She
didn't know and tucked her hands beneath her arms again.

"I can't, Ratepe. I'm Phyrexian. I can't trust myself.
I'm always wrong."

The powerstones were three-quarters of the way. The
devices beyond the ring of mirrors thrummed to life.

"I'm not! And I'm never wrong about you. Meet me in the
light, Xantcha. We're going to end the war."

Xantcha shed her armor and thrust her hands into the
spindle.

Begone! Listen and obey. Begone! Do not interfere.

The demon's anger, roaring through Xantcha's mind could
have been deception. Gix should have known that she would,
in the end, disobey his command, in which case Gix had
outwitted them all and wanted her to reach into the light.
But, on the chance that he wasn't quite that imaginative,
Xantcha extended her arms to their fullest reach.

Time and space changed around her. She'd left her body
behind. To the right, the Weakstone and the Mightstone, two
great glowing spheres, rolling toward her, fighting,
losing. To the left was the unspeakable, blood-red maw of
Gix, calling the stones, sucking them to their doom.

Straight ahead stood Ratepe, son of Mideah, with a
radiant smile and outstretched arms.

Their fingers touched.

Gix turned his wrath on her and on Ratepe. It was the
last thing the demon did. Xantcha felt the stones free
themselves to destroy the enemy they'd been created to
destroy.