by Lynn Abbey
"This should be an especial relief to you, Xantcha, since I will keep your heart in such a place where it cannot be lost or disturbed. It is also useful for me, since when I know where you are, I also know where your heart is, and contrariwise as well. And Serra has returned that crystal pendant I gave you while I was fleeing Phyrexia." He fished it out of one of the many boxes and draped it around Xantcha's neck. "You, I, and your heart and my pendant together make a single unit, a triangle, the strongest of angled structures. None of us can get lost."
Triangles ... triangles with four points? It had to be mathematics.... Of all the lessons Xantcha had been taught in the Fane of Flesh, mathematics had come hardest. She'd long since learned that she didn't need to understand the why of mathematics if she simply followed all the rules. If the rules turned her heart into one of a triangle's four parts, she'd keep quiet about it. And she'd survive with her heart in a niche on an airless moon the same way she'd survived the centuries when it had lain in the Phyrexian vault.
"What do you need of me?" she asked, hoping to forestall any further discussion of unimaginable triangles.
"You are good at sniffing out Phyrexians. When we reach a plane, I want you to explore it, as you would anyway, looking for infestations."
"I'll need to use the sphere, is that all right?" The modifications remained a sore point between them. "You'll fix it so it isn't black anymore?"
Urza ignored her questions. "For me, being somewhere quickly is easier than getting there slowly. I will search for the victors, the folk who drove the Phyrexians out and forced them to create Phyrexia."
You will do what you want, Xantcha thought in the most private corner of her mind. Of course, so would she. Life was never better than when she was soaring the windstreams, chasing her curiosity, trading trinkets with strangers, and
collecting the stories that born-folk told.
"What do I do if I find a Phyrexian infestation?" She liked the word, her mind filled with possible ways to drive out an infestation.
"You run away. The moment you are aware of Phyrexians, you hide yourself in the meeting place I'll point out to you, and you wait for me. I'll take no more chances with you and Phyrexians. You are vulnerable to them, Xantcha. It's no fault of yours-you're brave and good-spirited-but they tainted you. You are a bell goat and after you followed me to Phyrexia, my enemies were able to use you to find me-much as I will use your heart to find you."
I never told you the Ineffable's name. That's how they found you. Xantcha thought, but said nothing. She'd made her choice to stay with Urza, even knowing his obsessions and madness. If he reordered his memories of the past to absolve himself of blame or responsibility, well-he'd done it before and he'd do it again. Xantcha believed in vengeance against Phyrexia and believed that Urza, with all his flaws, stood a better chance of achieving it than she.
So they began their quest for the victors, the folk who'd driven the Phyrexians out of the natural multiverse. Urza set his mark on each world they visited, regardless of its hospitality. That way, he said, they would know when they'd come full circle. Xantcha wasn't certain about the full circle notion; it raised some of the same problems as a four-pointed triangle, but the marks kept them from accidentally exploring the same world twice.
It was no surprise to Xantcha that they found very few hospitable worlds where the Phyrexians had not made an appearance. She'd been a dodger. She knew about the relentless explorations carried out by the searcher- priests. The first few decades after leaving Serra's realm, she'd spent most of her time huddled up at whatever meeting place Urza designated, then gradually Urza had relaxed his rules. She could wander freely, provided she encountered no active Phyrexians.
Thus began a long, golden period of wandering the multiverse. Every handful of worlds held one that was hospitable enough for Xantcha to exchange Urza's armor for the sphere. Every ten or twelve handfuls of hospitable worlds revealed one that was interesting, at least to Xantcha. She became the tourist who delighted in minor variations, while Urza was on a single-minded quest.
"They were here," he said when they rejoined each other. They met in a white stone grotto of a world where elves were the dominant species and civilization was measured by forests, not cities.
"I know," Xantcha agreed, having found the spoor of two searcher expeditions and heard tales of demons with glistening, metallic skin in several languages. "Searchers came through a good long time ago. They're remembered as demons and the bringers of chaos. They came through again, maybe a thousand local years ago, but only in a few places. They collected beasts both times, I think. There's metal here, but no mines. The searchers will come back again. They're waiting for the elves to do the hard work of opening the ground."
Urza nodded though he wasn't happy. "How did you learn such things? There are no centers of learning here, few
records in the ground or above it. I have found it most frustrating!"
"I talk to everyone, Urza. I trade with them," she explained, handing Urza a sack filled with trinkets and treasures, her profits from three seasons' wandering. He'd take them to the bolt-hole where he kept her heart. "Everyone has a story,"
"A story, Xantcha-what I want is the truth! The hard- edged truth."
She squared her shoulders. "The truth is, this is not the victor's world. I could have told you that before the sun set twice."
"And how could you have done that?"
"No one here knows a word for war."
Urza stiffened. A planeswalker didn't have to listen with his ears. He could skim thought and meaning directly off the surface of another mind and drink down a new language like water. As a result, Urza seldom paid attention to the actual words he heard or spoke. He handled surprise poorly, embarrassment, worse. His breathing stopped, and his eyes shed their mortal illusion.
"I have encountered a new world," he snapped after a pensive moment. Equilor. His lips hadn't moved.
Xantcha didn't disbelieve him, although Equilor wasn't a word that she remembered hearing on this or any other world. "Is it a name?" she asked cautiously.
"An old name. The oldest name. The farthest plane. It belongs to a plane on the edge of time."
"Another created world, like Phyrexia or Serra's realm?"
"No, I think not. I hope not."
She'd wager, if she'd ever been the wagering sort, that Urza hadn't learned of Equilor from the elves of the forest world but had heard of it years ago and forgotten it until just now when she'd challenged him.
They set out at once, with no more preparation than Urza made for any between-worlds journey. He explained that preparation and, especially, directions weren't important. 'Walking the between-worlds wasn't like walking down a path. There was no north or south, left or right, only the background glow of all the planes that were and, rising out of the glow, a sense of those planes that a 'walker could reach in a single stride. By choosing the faintest of the rising planes at each step, Urza insisted they would in time arrive at Equilor, the plane on the edge of time.
Xantcha couldn't imagine a place where direction didn't matter, but then, for her the between-worlds remained as hostile as it had been the first time Urza dragged her through it. For her the between-worlds was a changeless place of paradox and sheer terror.
At first, the only evidence she had that Urza was doing anything different was indirect. Her armor crumbled, the instant Urza released her, in the air of the next, new world. There was breathable air in each new world they 'walked to, as if he'd at last given up the notion that the Phyrexians could have begun on a world without air. And Urza himself was exhausted when they arrived. He would go into the ground and sleep as much as a local year while she explored.
They were some thirty worlds beyond the elven forest
world when Urza announced, as Xantcha shook herself free of flaking armor:
"Here you do not need to look for Phyrexians. Here we will find others of my kind."
Urza didn't mean that he'd brought her to Domi
naria. Every so often, he journeyed alone to the brink of his birth-world to assure himself that it remained safe within the Shard they'd discovered long ago. Urza meant, instead, that he'd broken an age-old habit and set them down on a plane where other 'walkers congregated.
He'd never insinuated that he was unique, at least as far as 'walking between-worlds. Serra was a 'walker and so, Xantcha suspected, had been the Ineffable. But Urza had avoided other 'walkers until they came to the abandoned world he called Gastal.
"Be wary," he warned Xantcha. "I do not trust them. Without a plane to bind them, 'walkers forget what they were. They become predators, unless they go mad."
Knowing Urza fell in the latter category, Xantcha stayed carefully in his shadow as they approached a small, fanciful, and entirely illusory pavilion standing by itself on a barren, twilight plain, but the three men and two women they met there seemed unthreatening. They knew Urzaor knew of him-and welcomed him as a prodigal brother, though Xantcha couldn't actually follow their conversation: planeswalkers conversed directly in one another's minds.
But Urza was not the only 'walker who tempered his solitary life with a more ordinary companion. Outside the pavilion, Xantcha met two other women, one of them a blind dwarf, who braved the between-worlds on a 'walker's arm. Throughout the balmy night, the three of them sought a common language through which to share experience and advice. By dawn they'd made progress in a Creole that was mixed mostly from elven dialects from a hundred or more worlds. Xantcha had just pieced together that Varrastu, a dwarf, had heard of Phyrexia when Urza emerged to say it was time to move on.
Xantcha rose reluctantly. "Varrastu said that she and Manatar-qua have crossed swords with folk made from flesh and metal-"
Words failed as a second sun, yellowish-green in color, loomed suddenly high overhead. The air exploded as it hurtled toward them. Xantcha had the wit to be frightened but hadn't begun to guess why or to yawn Urza's armor from the cyst, when the pavilion burst into screaming flames, and Urza seized her against his chest. He pulled her between-worlds. Without the armor to protect her, she was bleeding and gasping when they re-emerged.
Urza laid her on the ground then cradled her face in his hands. "Don't go," he whispered.
It seemed an incongruous request. Xantcha wasn't about to go anywhere. The between-worlds had battered her to exhaustion. Her body seemed to have already fallen asleep. She wanted only to close her eyes and join it.
"No!" Urza pinched her cheeks. "Stay awake! Stay with me!"
Power like fire or countless sharp needles swirled around her. Xantcha fought feebly to escape the pain. She pleaded with him to release her.
"Live!" he shouted. "I won't let you die now."
Death would have been preferable to the torture flowing from Urza's fingers, but Xantcha hadn't the strength to resist his will. Mote by mote, he healed her and dragged her back from the brink.
"Sleep now, if you wish."
His hand passed over her eyes. For an instant, there was darkness and oblivion, then there was light, and Xantcha was herself again. She exhaled a pent-up breath and sat up.
"I don't know what came over me."
"Death," Urza said calmly. "I nearly lost you."
She remembered the yellow-green sun. "We must go back, Varrastu-Manatarqua-"
"Crossed swords with the Phyrexians. Yes. Manatarqua was the pavilion. She died on Gastal."
A shudder raced down Xantcha's spine. There was more that Urza wasn't saying. "How long ago?"
"In the time of this plane, nearly two years."
Xantcha noticed her surroundings: a bare-walled chamber with a window but not a door. She noticed herself. Her skin was white. It cracked and flaked when she moved, as if her armor clung in dead layers around her. Her hair, which she always hacked short around her face, hung below her shoulders. "Two years," she repeated, needing to say the words herself to make them true in her mind. "Long years?"
"Very long," Urza assured her. "You've recovered. I never doubted that you would, if I stayed beside you. You'll be hungry soon. I'll get food now. Tomorrow or the next day we'll move on toward Equilor."
Already Xantcha felt her stomach churning to life-after two empty years. Food would be nice, but there was another question: "At Gastal, Manatarqua-you said she 'was the pavilion." Do you mean that she was Phyrexian and that you slew her?"
"No, Manatarqua was a 'walker like myself, but much younger. I have no idea why she presented herself as an object. I didn't ask, it was her choice. Perhaps she hoped to hide from her enemies."
"Phyrexians?"
"Other planeswalkers. I told you, they-we-can become predatory, especially toward the newly sparked. I was nearly taken myself in the beginning-Meshuvel was her name. She was no threat to me. My eyes reveal sights no other 'walker can see. Until Serra, I avoided my own kind. They had no part to play in my quest for vengeance. I'd been thinking about 'walkers since leaving Serra's realm. I thought I might need someone more like myself."
"But they died."
"Manatarqua died. I suspect the others escaped unharmed, as I did. They prey on the young and the mortal because a mature 'walker is no easy target. But I had made up my mind almost from the start. I don't need another "walker. I need you. To finally realize that and then feel you die so soon afterward-it was almost enough to make me worship the fickle gods."
Xantcha imagined Urza on his knees or in a temple. She closed her eyes and laughed. He was gone when she reopened them, and she was too stiff yet to climb through the window. Her saner self insisted that Urza wouldn't abandon her, not after sitting beside her for two years, not after
what he'd just said about needing her. Then this world's sun passed beyond the window. Sanity's voice grew weaker as shadows lengthened. Of all the ways Xantcha knew to die, starvation was among the worst. She had dragged herself to the window and was hauling herself over the sill when she felt a breeze at her back. The breeze was thick with fresh bread, roasted meat, and fruit. Urza had returned.
He called the meal a celebration and ate with her, at least until a more ordinary sort of tiredness drove Xantcha back to the bed where she'd lain for so long. She awoke with the sun. There was a door beside the window, more food and, somewhere beyond the sun, near the edge of time, a world called Equilor.
* * *
Later, after they'd gotten to Dominaria, when Xantcha sorted through her memories, the largest pile belonged to the years they had searched for Equilor. Every season, for much more than a thousand Dominarian years, she and Urza wandered the multi-verse, taking other worlds' measure. There were surprises and excitement, mostly of the minor variety. After Serra's realm, Phyrexia seemed to lose interest in them-or, at least, had lost their trail. Though they sometimes found evidence of searcher-priests and excavations. Eventually, everything they found was long abandoned.
"I'm headed in the right direction," Urza would say whenever they came upon eroded ruins no one else would have noticed. "I'm headed toward the world that cast them out."
Xantcha was never so confident, but she never understood how Urza found anything in the between-worlds, much less how he distinguished hospitable worlds from inhospitable ones, near from far. She was content to follow a path that led endlessly away from the Phyrexia she knew and toward the vengeance that seemed equally distant. Until the day when they came to a quiet, twilight world.
"The edge of time itself," Urza said as he released Xantcha's wrists.
She shed her armor and filled her lungs with air that was unlike any other. "Old," she said after a few moments. "It's as if everything's finished-not dead, just done growing and changing. Even the mountains are smoothed down, like they've been standing too long, but nothing's come to replace them." She gestured toward the great, dark lump that dominated the landscape like a risen loaf of bread. "Somehow, I expected an edge to have sharp angles."
Urza nodded. "I expected a plane where everything had been put to use, not like this, neglected and left fallow."
Yet not completely fallow. As twilight deepened, lights winked open near the solitary mountain. There was a road, too: a ribbon of worn gray stone, cut in chevrons and fitted so precisely that not a blade of grass grew between them. Urza insisted he had no advance idea of what a new plane was like, no way at all of selecting the exact place where his feet would touch the ground, yet, more often than not, he 'walked out of the between-worlds in sight of a road and a town.
They began to travel down the road.
A carpet of bats took flight from the mountain, passing
directly over their heads. When their shrill chirping had subsided, other noises punctuated the night: howls, growls and a bird with a sweet, yet mournful song. Stars appeared, unfamiliar, of course, and scattered sparsely across the clear, black sky. No moon outshone them, but it was the nature of moons to produce moonless nights now and again. What surprised Xantcha was the scarcity of stars, as if time were stars and the black sky were itself the edge of time.
"A strange place," Xantcha decided as they strode down the road. "Not ominous or inhospitable, but filled with secrets."
"So long as one of them is Phyrexia, I won't care about the rest."
The light came from cobweb globes hovering above the road and the three-score graceful houses of an unfortified town. Urza lifted himself into the air to examine them and reported solemnly that he had not a clue to their construction or operation.
"They simply are," he said, "and my instinct is to leave them alone."
Xantcha smiled to herself. If that was Urza's instinct then whatever the globes were, they weren't simple.
A man came out to meet them. He appeared ordinary enough, though Xantcha understood how deceptive an ordinary appearance could be, and it bothered her that she hadn't noticed him leave any one of the nearby houses, hadn't noticed him at all until he was some fifty paces ahead and walking toward them. He wore a knee-length robe over loose trousers, both woven from a pale, lightweight fiber that rippled as he moved and sparkled as if it were shot with silver. His hair and beard were dark auburn in the globe light and neatly trimmed. A few wrinkles creased the outer corners of his eyes. Xantcha placed him in the prime of mortal life, but she'd place Urza there, too.
