Planeswalker

by Lynn Abbey

  "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."

  CHAPTER 22

  There was no laughter three days later over the Sea of Laments. The weather had been chancy since Xantcha had put the Argi-vian coast at her back. From the start, thick clouds had blocked her view of the sun and stars. She navigated against a wind she knew wasn't steady and with an innate sense of direction that grew less reliable as she tired. They hadn't seen land for two days, not even a boat.

  Xantcha would have brought the sphere down on a raft just then and taken her chances with strangers. A black wall-cloud had formed, leaking lightning, to the northeast. The waves below were stiff with cross winds and froth. She knew better than to try to soar above the impending storm, didn't have the strength to outrun it, and didn't know what would happen to the sphere if- when-downdrafts slammed it into the ocean.

  Ratepe had his arms around her, keeping Xantcha warm and upright, the most he could do. He'd spotted the storm but hadn't said anything, other than that he knew how to swim. Ratepe was one up on Xantcha there; the long-ago seamen who'd taught her how to sail had warned her never to get friendly with the sea. If- when-they went down, she'd yawn out Urza's armor. Maybe it would keep her afloat, though it never had kept her dry.

  The storm was bigger than the wall-cloud, and fickle, too. In a matter of minutes it spawned smaller clouds, one to the north, the other directly overhead. The first wind was a downdraft that hit the sphere so hard Xantcha and Ratepe were weightless, floating and screaming within it. Then, as Xantcha fought to keep them above the waves, a vagrant wind struck from the south. The south wind pushed them into sheets of noisy, blinding rain.

  The squall died as suddenly as it had been born. Xantcha could see again and wished she couldn't. The distance between them and the storm's heart had been halved and, worse, a waterspout had spun out. Rooted in both the ocean and the clouds, the sinuous column of seawater and wind bore down on them as if it had eyes and they were prey.
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  "What is that?" Ratepe whispered.

  "Waterspout," she told him and felt his fingers lock into her arms like talons.

  "Is it going to eat us?"

  The waterspout wasn't alive and didn't really have an appetite for fools, but that scarcely mattered as they were caught and spun with such force that the sphere flattened against them. It flattened but held, even when they slammed into the raging waves. At one point Xantcha thought they were underwater, if only because everything had become dark and quiet. Then the ocean spat them out, and they hurtled through wind and rain.

  Wind, rain, and, above all, lightning. Whatever the cyst produced, whether it was Urza's armor or the sphere, it attracted lightning. Bolts struck continuously. The air within the sphere turned acrid and odd. It pulled their hair and clothes away from their bodies and set everything aglow with blue-white light. Xantcha lost all sense of

  north or south and counted herself lucky that she still knew up from down.

  Every few moments the storm paused, as if regrouping its strength for the next assault. In one such breather, Ratepe leaned close to her ear and said, "I love you,"

  She shouted back, "We're not dead yet!" and surrendered the sphere to an updraft that carried them into the storm's heart.

  They rose until the rain became ice and froze around the sphere, making it heavy and driving it down to the sea. Xantcha thought for sure they'd hit the waves, sink, and drown, but the storm wasn't done playing with them. As lightning boiled off the ice, the winds launched them upward again. Xantcha tried to break the cycle, but her efforts were useless. They rose and froze, plummeted, and rose again, not once or twice, but nine times before they fell one last time and found themselves floating on the ocean as the storm passed on to the south.

  The pitch and roll among the choppy waves was the insult after injury. Ratepe's grip on Xantcha's arms weakened, and she suffered nausea.

  "I can't lift us up," she said, having tried and failed. "I'm going