Planeswalker (26 page)

"The others?" Xantcha asked. She would have soared off
in the sphere days earlier and over her companion's
objections, if the cyst weren't still churning and awkward
in her gut.

The stranger stood up, a first since Xantcha had

returned from her walk. Gray eyes rapt on the moving
specks, she walked into the unbroken grass. She reached out
toward them with both arms stretched to the fingertips. But
the specks moved on, her arms fell, and she returned to
Xantcha, all sagging shoulders and weariness.

In this world without night, it finally dawned on
Xantcha that she might have leapt to the wrong conclusions.
"How long have you been here?" A friend's concern rather
than a prisoner's accusation.

"I came with you."

Still a circular answer, but the tone had been less
aloof. Xantcha persisted. "How long ago was that? How much
time has passed since we've both been here?"

"Time is. Time cannot be cut and measured."

"As long as we've been sitting here, was I lying under
the rock longer than that, or not as long?"

The stranger's brow furrowed. She looked at her hands.
"Longer. Yes, much longer."

"Longer than you expected?"

"Very much longer."

"The air sustains us, but otherwise we've been
forgotten?"

More furrowed brows, more silence, but the language
implanted in her mind had words for time and forgetting.
Meaning came before words. The stranger had to understand
the question.

"Why are we both here, beside this rock and forgotten?
What happened?"

"The angels found you and another-"

"Urza? I was with Urza?"

"With another not like you. His eyes see everything."

Xantcha slouched back against the rock. Raw fear
drained down her spine. "Urza." She'd been found with Urza.
Everything would be resolved; it was only a matter of time.
"What happened to Urza?"

"The angels brought you both to the Lady's palace. The
Lady held onto Urza. But you, you are not like Urza. She
said she could do nothing with you, and you would die. The
Lady does not look upon death."

"I was stuck out here to die, and you were put here to
watch me until I did. But I didn't, and so we're both stuck
here. Is that it?"

"We will wait."

"For what?"

"The palace."

Xantcha pressed her hands over her mouth, lest her
temper escape. A newt, she told herself. The gray-eyed
stranger was a newt. She listened, she obeyed, she had no
imagination and didn't know how to leap from one thought to
another. Xantcha herself had been like that until Gix had
come to the First Sphere, probing her mind, making her
defend herself, changing her forever. Xantcha had no
intention of invading the stranger's privacy. She didn't
have the ability, even if she'd had the intention. All she
wanted was the answers that would reunite her with Urza.

And if her questions changed the stranger, did that
make Xantcha herself another Gix? No, she decided and
lowered her hands. She would not have poured acid down the
fumarole to Gix's grave if he'd done nothing more than
awaken her self-awareness.

"What if we didn't wait," Xantcha asked with all the
enthusiasm of a conspirator in pursuit of a partner. "What
if we went to the palace ourselves."

"We can't."

"Why not? Urza gave me a gift once. If you could tell
me where the palace is, it could take us both there."

"No. Impossible. We shouldn't be speaking of this. I
shouldn't be speaking with you at all. The Lady herself
could do nothing with you. Enough. We will wait... in
perfect silence."

The stranger bowed her head and folded her hands in her
lap. Her lips moved rapidly as she recited something-
Xantcha guessed a prayer-to herself. No matter. The wall
had been breached. Xantcha was a conspirator in search of a
partner, and she had nothing else to do but plan her next
attack.

Within two days she had the stranger's name, Sosinna,
and the certainty that Sosinna considered herself a woman.
Two days more and she had the name of the Lady, Serra.
After that, it was quite easy to keep Sosinna talking,
although the sad truth was that Sosinna knew no more about
Serra's world than Xantcha had known about Phyrexia when
Urza first rescued her.

Sosinna was a Sister of Serra, one of many woman who
served that lady in her palace. If Xantcha had not walked
for three days straight and found herself back where she'd
started, she would have laughed aloud when Sosinna
described Serra's palace as a wondrous island floating
forever among the golden clouds. But it did seem true that
Serra's world had no land, not as other worlds where men
and women dwelt had great masses of rocks rising from their
oceans. Xantcha had already learned that she couldn't walk
to the edge of the floating island where she and Sosinna
sat in exile, but once she had the thought of a floating
island in her mind, Xantcha could see that many of the
darker clouds around them weren't clouds at all but
miniature worlds of grass and stone.

The others Sosinna had mentioned were angels, winged
folk who did Serra's bidding away from the palace. Angels
had found Urza and Xantcha, though Sosinna didn't know
where, and angels had brought Xantcha and Sosinna to their
exile island because the Sisters of Serra were unable to
leave the floating palace on their own. The angels' wings
weren't like Urza's cyst-the idea of having an artifact
reside permanently in her stomach appalled Sosinna so much
that she stopped talking for three full days. Nor were the
wings added in some floating-island equivalent of the Fane
of Flesh. That notion roused Sosinna's anger.

"Angels," she informed Xantcha emphatically, "are born.
Here we are all born. The Lady reveres life. She would not
ever countenance that-that-Fane. Filth. Waste. Death! No
wonder-no wonder that the Lady said you could not be
helped! I will have nothing more to do with you. Nothing at
all!"

Sosinna couldn't keep her vow. The woman who'd sat
silently for days on end, could not resist telling Xantcha
in great detail about the perfect way in which the Lady
raised her realm's children.

Births, it seemed, were rare. Incipient parents dwelt
in the palace under the Lady's immediate care, and their

precious children, once they were born and weaned, went to
the nursery where the Lady personally undertook their
education. Sosinna's voice thickened with nostalgia as she
described the tranquil cloister where she'd learned the
arts of meditation and service. Privately, Xantcha thought
Lady Serra's nursery sounded as grim as the Fane of Flesh,
but she kept those thoughts to herself, smiling politely,
even wistfully, at each new revelation.

On the twentieth day of forced smiles, Xantcha's
conspiratorial campaign achieved its greatest victory when
Sosinna confessed that she was in love, perfectly and
eternally, with one of her nursery peers: an angel.

"Is that permitted?" Xantcha interrupted before she had
the wit to censor herself. The notion of love fascinated
her, and spending most of her life in Urza's shadow or
hiding her unformed flesh beneath a young man's clothes,
she'd had very little opportunity to learn love's secrets.
"You don't have wings."

Xantcha's curiosity was ill-timed and rude. It
jeopardized everything she'd gained through long days of
patient questions, but it was sincere. On worlds where
mankind lived side by side with elves or dwarves or any
other sentients, love, with all its complications was
rarely encouraged, more frequently forbidden. She hardly
expected love between the Sisters of Serra and winged
angels to flourish in a place where the mere appearance of
the sun would have spoilt the perfection of the sunrise.

But Sosinna surprised Xantcha with a furious blush that
stretched from the collar of her white gown into her pale
gold hair.

"Wings," Sosinna exclaimed, "have nothing to do with
it!" A lie, if ever Xantcha had heard one. "We are all bom
the same, raised the same. Our parentage is not important
to Lady Serra. We are all equal in her service. She
encourages us to cherish each other openly and to follow
our hearts, not our eyes, when we declare our one true
love."

More lies, though Sosinna's passion was real.
"Kenidiern is a paragon," she confided in a whisper. "No
one serves the Lady with more bravery and vigor. He has
examined every aspect of his being and cast out all trace
of imperfection. There is not one mote of him that isn't
pure and devoted to duty. He stands above all the other
angels, and no one would fault him if he were proud, but he
isn't. Kenidiern has embraced humility. There isn't a woman
alive who wouldn't exchange tokens with him, but he has
given his to me."

Sosinna removed her veil and, sweeping her hair aside,
revealed a tiny golden earring in the lobe of her left ear.

"Beautiful. An honor above all others," Xantcha agreed,
trying to imitate Sosinna's lofty tone while she wracked
her mind for a way to turn this latest revelation toward a
reunion with Urza and escape from Serra' s too-perfect
realm. "It must be difficult for you to be apart from him.
You can't know what he's doing, or where. If something had
happened to him, you wouldn't know and, well, if he's given
you his token, it's not likely that he'd have forgotten
you, so you have to think that he's looking for you, if he
can." Xantcha smiled a very Phyrexian smile. Urza would
disapprove, although there was no reason for him to ever

know. "Of course, sometimes, even paragons get distracted."

Several long moments of nervous fiddling passed before
Sosinna said, "We have our duties. We both serve the Lady.
Everyone serves the Lady first and foremost." She sat up
straight and looked very uncomfortable. "I have strayed
from the path. We will speak of these things no more."

But the damage had been done. Sosinna had lost the
ability to stare endlessly at nothing. She watched the
clouds. Xantcha supposed Sosinna was looking for angels and
hoped, for her own selfish reasons, that they appeared. In
the end, though, it wasn't angels that got them moving.

Once she'd learned that Serra's realm was composed of
islands drifting in a cloudy sea, Xantcha had quickly
realized that each island had its own rhythm and path. With
a persistent ache in her stomach, Xantcha wasn't tempted to
yawn out the sphere and become her own island, but she
thought she could hop from one island to another if a more
interesting one drifted near. She dismissed the possibility
of a collision between two of the Lady's islands as an
unimaginable imperfection, until the ground bucked beneath
them.

One moment Xantcha and Sosinna were laying flat,
clinging to the rooted grass. The next, they were both
thrown into the air while the land beneath shattered. For
an instant they floated weightless; then the falling began.
Without thinking or hesitating, Xantcha yawned and grabbed
Sosinna's ankle. The cyst was slow to release its power,
and the sphere, when it finally emerged, was midnight
black.

Xantcha and Sosinna both screamed as the darkness
sealed around them. Navigation was impossible, and they
became one more tumbling object in the chaos raining down
from the colliding islands. Sosinna called her lady's name,
begging for deliverance. Xantcha hoped Serra could hear.
The sphere wasn't like Urza's armor. The armor lasted until
Xantcha willed it away, but once the sphere had risen, it
collapsed as soon as it touched the ground. At least that
was what had always happened. It might do something
different this time when it had come out black.

The jostling, which seemed to last forever, ended when
they struck a decisive bottom. The sphere collapsed, as it
always had, coating Xantcha in soot and leaving them in a
shower of rocks. Xantcha was stunned when a stone struck
her head. But mind-stars were all she saw through the
sticky soot. Sosinna's hand closed over hers. Xantcha let
herself be guided to a place where the air was quiet.

"So, what next?" Xantcha asked when she'd wiped away
enough soot to open her eyes.

There wasn't much to see. The air was dusty, and the
overhead island-the island from which they'd fallen and
that continued to rain chunks of itself onto the island
where they were standing- remained close enough to keep
them in twilight darkness. She feared another collision.

"We can't stay here," she added, in case Sosinna had
missed the obvious.

They were both nursing bruises. Xantcha's hand came
away bloody when she touched the throbbing spot where the

rock had hit her skull. The left sleeve of Sosinna's gown
was torn to rags, and she was dripping soot-streaked blood
from a gash on her forearm. Xantcha never worried her own
cuts. She healed quick, and the infections or illnesses
that plagued born-folk weren't interested in newt-flesh.
She worried about Sosinna, instead.

Although Sosinna had gotten them to safety beyond the
rock fall, she was dazed and unresponsive. She held her
bleeding arm in front of her and stared at it with glassy
eyes. The folk of Serra's realm were born, or so Sosinna
had claimed. Despite the strangeness of the floating-island
realm and the way Serra's air sustained them, Sosinna might
be as fragile as the born-folk usually were. The soot alone
might kill her. Blood poisoning wasn't an easy death or a
quick one. But unless she had hidden injuries, Sosinna's
problem had to be shock and fear.

"Waste not, want not, you're not near dead yet. Pull
yourself-"

"It was black," Sosinna interrupted.

"I noticed," Xantcha said with a shrug. "It's always
been clear before. But it kept us alive, and we'll use it
again."

Sosinna wrenched free. "No! You don't understand. It
was black! Nothing here is black. The Lady doesn't permit
it." She began to weep. "I told you, you couldn't call on
black mana here."

"Black mana? I'm no sorcerer, Sosinna. I've never
called to the land in my life." But the cyst had felt wrong
since she'd awakened, worse since she'd used it, and the
sphere had been black.

"You shattered the land. Shattered it!"

Xantcha didn't demand gratitude, but she wouldn't stand
for abuse. "I didn't shatter anything. Two islands
collided, and I kept us alive the only way I knew how.
Would you rather I'd left you to be crushed by the rocks?"

"Yes! Yes, they'll come for you because of what you've
done, and they'll come for me because what you've done is
all over me."

"If I'd known that, I'd've done it sooner," Xantcha
lied.

Xantcha wasn't in pain. If anything, she was numb. For
the first time in centuries, she wasn't aware of Urza's
cyst. Her hand felt cloth when she rubbed below her waist,
but the rest of her couldn't feel her hand. The numbness
wasn't spreading. The part of her mind that knew when she
was healthy said that she was numb because she was empty.
She didn't know what would happen if she called on the cyst
while her gut was numb and didn't want to find out unless
she had to.

"How long before your Lady gets here?"

"The Lady won't come. She takes no part in death, even
when she knows it must be done. The archangels will come."
Sosinna looked up at the still-crumbling underside of their
original floating island. "Soon."

Sosinna dried her tears, leaving fresh streaks of blood
and soot on her face. Then she did what Serra's folk seemed
to do best: she sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and
settled in to wait. The gash on her arm continued to bleed.
Maybe Sosinna didn't feel pain, or maybe she hoped she'd
bleed to death before the dreaded archangels arrived.

If her own life hadn't hung in the balance, Xantcha
would have laughed at the absurdity. She grabbed Sosinna
below the shoulders and hauled the taller woman to her
feet.

"You want to live, Sosinna. You got us both away from
the falling rocks and dirt-" She shook the other woman,
hoping for reaction. "You want to live. You want to see
Kenidiern again."

A blink. A frown. Nothing.

"This is not perfection!" Xantcha shouted and then let
Sosinna go.

The taller woman balanced on her own feet a moment,
then calmly sat down again. Xantcha walked away in disgust.
She'd gone about ten paces before the light of
understanding brightened in her mind.

"You knew!" Xantcha shouted as she ran back. "You've
known from the beginning! You've been expecting these archwhatever-
angels since I woke up ... since before I woke up.
Your precious, perfect

Lady sent me here to be killed and sent you as what? A
witness? 'Come back to the floating palace when
everything's taken care of.'? All this time, waiting for
the archangels-"

"I never wanted them to come!" Sosinna shouted back.

It was the first time Xantcha had heard the other woman
raise her voice-perhaps the first time Sosinna had raised
it. She seemed aghast by her outburst.

"Why not? Didn't you want to get back to the palace and
Keni-diern?"

Sosinna gasped and fumbled for words. "Don't you
understand? I can't go back."

"Because I saved your life with my black mana." Xantcha
thought she understood, perfectly. "If only the archangels
had been a little quicker. Is that what you've been doing
while you sat all the time. Praying to the archangels: get
here soon?"

"I didn't want you to wake up because while you were
asleep there was no chance you'd use your black powers, and
nothing would draw the archangels to us. Once you were
awake ... You are ... You are so difficult. I was
afraid to tell you anything."

"I'd be much less difficult," Xantcha said with
exaggerated politeness, "if I knew the truth." She sat down
opposite Sosinna. "The perfect truth."

"Kenidiern-"

Xantcha rolled her eyes. "Why am I not surprised that
he is at the heart of the truth?"

"You are very difficult. It is the black mana in you.
It rules you. The Lady said so."

Xantcha wondered what the Lady had said about Urza, but
that would have been a truly difficult question. "I know
nothing about black mana, but I won't argue with your
Lady's judgment. Go on ... please ... before we run out
of time."

"How can you run out of time?"

Xantcha shrugged. "Just talk."

"The Lady smiled on Kenidiern and I. She has never
encouraged the divisions between the sisterhood and the
angels. We had her blessing to come to the palace, but
before we could be together he was sent away, and I was

chosen to accompany you. I would not have objected,"
Sosinna continued quickly and emphatically. "I serve Lady
Serra proudly, willingly. We all know how she sacrifices
herself to maintain the realm. It would be the worst sort
of pride and arrogance to question her decisions.... But I
could not, cannot believe this was her decision."

"To send me away to die or to send you away to die with
me?"

Sosinna had the decency to look uncomfortable. "You are
difficult, and you are devious. You imagine dark corners
and then you make them real."

That was a criticism Xantcha had never heard from
Urza's lips.

"You would never do among the sisters or the angels,
but if I were to speak to the Lady, I would tell her that
except for your black mana you would make a most excellent
archangel, and I think she would agree. I was-am-young
among the sisters, but I have-had-the Lady's confidence. I
know she would not have sent me away without seeing me or
telling me why."

"Then why hasn't she come looking for you? Wouldn't she
notice you were missing, you and Kenidiern, both?"

Sosinna shivered. "You ask such questions, Xantcha! I
would never think to ask such questions myself." She paused
and Xantcha raised her eyebrows expectantly. "Until I met
you. Now, I ask myself such questions, and I do not like my
own answers! I ask myself if the Lady has been deceived by
those who were displeased that Kenidiern had given me his
token, and no matter how hard I try to purge my thoughts, I
cannot convince myself that she hasn't."

"Or maybe your Lady's not perfect?"

Sosinna's thin-lipped mouth opened, closed, and opened
again. "I don't know if she never looked for me or if she
could not find me but in either case, yes, there would be
imperfection. So you see I cannot go back to the palace,
not with these thoughts in my heart. Kenidiern is lost. You
mock me, Xantcha, do not bother to lie about it, but
Kenidiern is a paragon. He would have looked for me and
since he hasn't-"

"Hasn't found you, but maybe he is looking. How many of
these floating islands are there? A thousand? Ten thousand?
You shouldn't give up. He might be just one rock away.
Think of the look on his face when he finds you here dead
because you stopped trying to stay alive."

"Difficult."

"But right."

"Half right." A faint smile cracked the dirt on
Sosinna's face, then vanished. "We couldn't go back to the
palace."

"Seems to me that's exactly the place we should be
going."

"We wouldn't be welcomed."

"Waste not, want not, Sosinna, your precious Lady is
being lied to, and you'd roll over and die without your
lover because your enemies won't welcome you."

"Not enemies."

"Enemies. Anyone who wants you dead, Sosinna, is an
enemy, yours and your Lady's. If you're determined to die,
let's at least try to find this floating palace where your
Lady is surrounded by silent enemies. Urza will support

you."

That was a promise Xantcha didn't know if she'd be able
to keep, but it had to be made. Anything that would get
Sosinna thinking had to be done, because even if the
archangels didn't show up, the islands were likely to
collide again. The upper island had taken the worst damage
in the first collision and might again in the second, but
anything on the surface of the lower island was going to
get squashed like a bug.

"Difficult," Sosinna repeated.

Xantcha stood up and offered her hand. "But right."

"I don't know where the palace is. Only the angels
know."

"Didn't Kenidiern ever tell you how he flew in and
out?"

"We never talked about such things."

Xantcha almost asked what did they talk about, but
Sosinna might have answered, and she didn't truly want to
know. "Come on, let's at least start walking. We've got to
walk ourselves clear of what's overhead. Maybe when we get
to an edge we'll get lucky and see this wondrous palace."
"We can't." "Can't what?"

"We can't walk to the edge of an island. I don't think
we can walk out from under the one overhead. I tried,
Xantcha, before you woke up. I tried to abandon you. I knew
when you walked away that you'd have to come back."

"No apologies. Pd've done the same," Xantcha said and
offered her hand again. "Come on. I've lived with worlds
over my head, but not this close. Makes me nervous."

Sosinna reached, and winced as the gash on her arm
began bleeding again. It was ugly now and would only get
worse if they didn't find water soon. Xantcha hadn't seen
free-running water since she'd first opened her eyes in
Serra's realm, but now that Sosinna was moving again, she
didn't seem worried about her wounds, so Xantcha said
nothing either.

Xantcha kept an eye on the island overhead to measure
their progress. The lethargy that had slowed her on her
previous walk was worse. They weren't covering ground the
way she would have liked. Even so, they were getting
nowhere relative to the convoluted underside above them.
Sosinna looked at her every time she looked up, a look that
expected concessions and defeat, but Xantcha kept walking.

Sosinna's remarks about black mana had confirmed
Xantcha's suspicion that Serra's floating-island realm was
a magical place, as unnatural in its way as Phyrexia. The
forces that made Phyrexia a world of concentric spheres
were as inexplicable as the ones that shaped Serra's realm
into thousands of floating islands ... and, perhaps, not
all that different from each other. She'd have questions
for Urza when they met again. If they met again. If she and
Sosinna could walk to a place where the opening between the
collided islands was large enough that she'd risk casting
them adrift in the sphere.

The thought of waking up the cyst brought an end to gut
numbness. Xantcha dropped to one knee.

"The archangels will find us," Sosinna said, not the
words Xantcha wanted to hear at that moment. "Every time
you call on black mana, it brings them closer."

"I didn't call on black mana," Xantcha insisted.

Xantcha used a mnemonic to awaken Urza's artifact. She
didn't know how the cyst made the sphere or armor. Urza
knew mana-based sorcery; the necessary insights had come
with his eyes. He said the Thran hadn't used mana so he
wouldn't either, but the Thran had made Urza's eyes.
Sosinna thought Xantcha imagined dark corners. Xantcha
didn't need imagination so long as she had Urza.