Planeswalker (4 page)

"You moved her there?"

"Never!" Urza roared. His eyes flashed, and the air
within the cottage was very still. "I refine my
understanding, I do not ever control them. Each time, I
create new opportunities for the truth to emerge. Time,
Xantcha, time is always the key. I call them motes of time-
the tiny motes of time that replay the past, long after
events have passed beyond memory. The more I refine my
automata, the more of those motes I can attract. Truth
attracts truth as time attracts time Xantcha, and the more
motes of time I can attract, the more truth I learn about
that day. And finally- finally-the truth clings to Ashnod,

and she has been drawn out of her lies and deception. Watch
as she reveals what I have always suspected!"

Urza snapped his fingers, and, equally fascinated and
repelled, Xantcha watched Ashnod's gnat skulk from shadow
to shadow until it was outside the parley tent, very near
Mishra's back. Then the Ashnod-gnat knelt and manipulated
something-the glass wasn't strong enough to unmask the
object-and a tiny spark leaped from her hands. Mishra's
wisps and filings glowed green.

The illusion of movement and free will was so seamless
that Xantcha asked, "What did she do?" rather than What did
it do?

"What do you think? Were your eyes open? Were you
paying attention? Must I move them backward and do it
again?" Urza replied.

Urza was less tolerant of free will in his companions.
Xantcha marveled that Tawnos never left him, but perhaps,
Urza had been less acid-tongued in his mortal days. "I
don't know." She set the lens on a shelf slung beneath the
table. "It has never been my place to think. Tell me, and I
will stand enlightened."

Their eyes locked, and for a moment Xantcha stared into
the ancient jewels through which Urza interpreted his life.
Urza could reduce her to memory, but he blinked first.

"Proof. Proof at last. Ashnod's the one. I always
suspected she was the first the Phyrexians suborned." Urza
seized the lens and thrust it back into Xantcha's hands.
"Now, look at the dragon engine. The Yotians have not begun
to move against the qadir, but see ... see? It has
already awakened. Ashnod cast her spark upon my brother,
and he called to it. It would only respond to him, you
know."

Xantcha didn't peer through the lens. A blanket of
light had fallen across the worktable, a hungry blanket
that rose into Urza's glowing eyes rather than fell from
them.

"Mishra! Mishra!" Urza whispered. "If only you could
see me, hear me. I was not there for you then, but I am
here for you now.

Cast your heart upward and I will open your eyes to the
treachery around you!"

Xantcha didn't doubt Urza's ability, only his sanity,
especially when he started talking to his gnat-brother.
Urza believed that each moment of time contained every
other moment, and that it was possible to not only recreate
the past but to reach into it and affect it. Someday, as
sure as the sun rose in the east, Urza would talk to the
gnats on his table. He'd tell Mishra all the secrets of his
heart, and Mishra would answer him. None of it would be the
truth, but all of it would be real.

Xantcha dreaded that coming day. She set the lens down
again and tried to distract Urza with a question. "So, your
side-?"

Urza focused his eyes uncanny light on her face. "Not
my side! I was not a party to anything that happened that
day! I was ignorant of everything. They lied to me and
deceived me. They knew I would never consent to their
treachery. I would have stopped them. I would have warned
my brother!"

Xantcha beat a tactical retreat. "Of course. But even

if you had, the end would not have changed," she said in
her most soothing tone. "If you've got it right, now, then
the warlord's schemes were irrelevant. Through Ashnod, the
Phyrexians had their own treachery-against the qadir and
the warlord, against you and Mishra. None of you were meant
to survive."

"Yes," Urza said on a caught breath. "Yes! Exactly!
Neither the qadir nor the warlord were supposed to survive.
It was a plot to capture me as they had already captured my
brother. Thus he was willing, but also reluctant, to talk
to me!" He turned back to the table. "I understand,
Brother. I forgive! Be strong, Mishra-I will find a way to
save you as I saved myself."

Xantcha repressed a shudder. There were inconsistencies
among her copies of The Antiquity Wars but none on the
scale Urza proposed. "Was your brother transformed then, or
still flesh?"

Urza backed away from the table. His eyes were clouded,
almost normal in appearance. "I will learn that next time,
or the time after that. They have suborned him. See how he
responds to Ashnod. She was their first creature. They must
have known that if we talked privately, I would have sensed
the change in him... .

I would have set him free. If there was still any part
of him left that could have been freed. Or, I would have
turned my wrath on them from that point forward. They knew
I could not be suborned, Xantcha, because I possessed the
Mightstone. The stones have equal power, Xantcha, but the
power is different. The Weak-stone is weakness, the
Mightstone is strength, and the Phyrexians never dared my
strength. Ah, the evil that day, Xantcha. If they had not
driven us apart, there would have been no war, except
against them... . You see that, Xantcha. You see that,
don't you? My brother and I together would have driven them
back to Koilos. They knew our power before we'd begun to
guess it."

They and them. They and them. With Urza, it all came
back to they and them: Phyrexians. Xantcha knew the
Phyrexians for the enemies they were. She'd never argue
that they hadn't played a pivotal role in Urza's wars.
Perhaps they had suborned Mishra and Ashnod, too. But while
Urza played with gnats on a tabletop, another wave of
Phyrexians, real Phyrexians, had washed up on Dominaria's
shores.

"It makes no difference," she protested. "Mishra's been
dead for more than three thousand years! It hardly matters
whether you failed him, or Ashnod destroyed him, or the
Phyrexians suborned him, or whether it happened before "The
Dawn of Fire" or after. Urza, you're creating a past that
doesn't matter-"

"Doesn't matter! They took my brother from me, and made
of him my greatest enemy. It matters, Xantcha. It will
always matter more than anything else. I must learn what
they did and how and when they did it." He breathed, a slow
sigh. "I could have stopped them. I must not fail again."
He held his hands above the table. Xantcha didn't need the
lens to know that Mishra's gnat shone bright. "I won't,
Mishra. I will never fail again. I have learned caution. I
have learned deception. I will not be tricked, not even by
you!"

Before Urza had brought Xantcha to Dominaria, she'd
been more sympathetic to his guilt-driven obsessions. Now
she said, "Not even you can change the past," and didn't
care if he struck her down for impudence. "Are you going to
stand by and play with toys while the Phyrexians steal your
birthplace from you? They're back. I smelled them in
Baszerat and Morvern. The Baszerati and the Morvernish are
at war with each other, just as the Yotians and the Fallaji
were, and the Phyrexians are on both sides. Sound
familiar?"

Her neck ached from staring up at him and braving his
gem-stone stare. Xantcha had no arcane power to draw upon,
but nose to nose, she was more stubborn. "Why are we here,"
she asked in the breathless silence, "if you're not going
to take a stand against the Phyrexians? We could play games
anywhere."

Urza retreated. He moistened his lips and made other
merely mortal gestures. "Not games, Xantcha. I can afford
no more mistakes. Dominaria has not forgotten or forgiven
what happened last time. I must tread lightly. So many
died, so much was destroyed, and all because I was blind
and deaf. I did not see that my brother was not himself,
that he was surrounded by enemies. I didn't hear his pleas
for help."

"He never pled for help! That's why you didn't hear,
and you can never know why he didn't, because you can never
talk to him again. No matter what happens in this room, on
that table, you can't bring him back! Now you've got Ashnod
outside the tent. You've made her into another Phyrexian,
pulling Mishra's strings. The Yotians were planning an
ambush, the Phyrexians were planning an ambush, and you
weren't wise to either plot. Waste not, want not, Urza-if
the Phyrexians had Ashnod before "The Dawn of Fire," how
did she manage, thirty years later, to send Tawnos to you
with the sylex? Or was that part of a plot, too? A compleat
Phyrexian doesn't have a conscience, Urza. A compleat
Phyrexian doesn't feel remorse; it can't. Mishra never
did."

"He couldn't. He'd been suborned," Urza shouted.
"Usurped. Corrupted. Destroyed! He was no longer a man when
I faced him in Argoth. They'd taken his will, flensed his
flesh and stretched it over an abomination!"

"But they didn't take Ashnod's will? She sent the
sylex. Was her will stronger than your brother's?"

Xantcha played a dangerous game herself and played it
to the brink. Urza had frozen, no blinking or breathing, as
if he'd become an artifact himself. Xantcha pressed her
advantage.

"Was Ashnod stronger than you too? Strong enough to
double-deal the Phyrexians and save Dominaria in the only
way she could?"

"No," Urza whispered.

"No? No what, Urza? Once you start treating bom men and
women as Phyrexians, where do you stop? Ashnod skulking
outside your tent before the Dawn of Fire, Ashnod sending
Tawnos with the sylex? One time she's a Phyrexian puppet,
the next she's not? Are you sure you know which is which?
Or, maybe, she was the puppet both times, and what would
that make you? You used the sylex."

Urza folded a fist. "Stop," he warned.

"The Phyrexians spent three thousand years trying to
slay you, before they gave up. I think they gave up because
they'd found a better way. Leave you alone on a
mountainside playing with toys!"

He'd have been a powerful man if muscle and bone had
been his strength's only source, but Urza had the power of
the Thran through his eyes, and the power of a sorcerer
standing on his native ground. His arm began to move. As
long as she could see it moving, Xantcha believed she was
safe.

The fist touched her hair and stopped. Xantcha held her
breath. He'd never come that close, never actually touched
her before. They couldn't go on like this, not if there was
any hope for Dominaria.

"Urza?" she whispered when, at last, her lungs demanded
air. "Urza, can you hear me? Do you see me?" Xantcha
touched his arm. "Urza ... Urza, talk to me."

He trembled and grabbed her shoulder for balance. He
didn't know his strength; pain left her gasping. Her eyes
were shut when he made the transition, temporary even at
the best of times, back into the here and now. Something
happened to Urza when he cast his power over the worktable,
not the truth, but definitely real and definitely getting
worse.

"Xantcha!" his hand sprang away from her as though she
were made from red-hot metal. "Xantcha, what is this?" He
stared at the crockery mountains as if he'd never seen them
before - though Xantcha had seen even that reaction more
times than she cared to remember.

"You summoned me, Urza," she said flatly. "You had
something new to show me."

"But this?" He gestured at his mountain-and-gnat
covered table. "Where did this come from. Not-not me. Not
again?"

She nodded.

"I was sitting on the porch as the sun set. It was
quiet, peaceful. I thought of-I thought of the past,
Xantcha, and it began again." He shrank within himself.
"You weren't here."

"I was after food. You were inside when I returned.
Urza, you've got to let go of the past. It's not... It's
not healthy. Even for you, this is not healthy."

They stared at each other. This had happened so many
times before that there was no longer a need for
conversation. Even the moment when Urza swept everything
off his table was entirely predictable.

"It's started, Urza, truly started. This time there's a
war south of here," Xantcha said, while dust still rose
from the crumbled mountains, quicksilver slithered across
the packed dirt floor, and gnats by the hundreds scrambled
for shelter.

"Phyrexians?"

"I kenned them on both sides. Sleepers. They take
orders, they don't give them, but it's a Dominarian war
with Phyrexian interference on both side."

He took the details directly from her mind: a painless
process when she cooperated.

"Baszerat and Morvern. I do not know these names."

"They aren't mighty kingdoms with glorious histories.
They're little more than walled cities, a few villages and,

to keep the grudge going, a handful of gold mines in the
hills between them; something for the Phyrexians to
exploit. They're getting bolder. Baszerat and Morvern
aren't the only places I've scented glistening oil in the
wind, but this is the first war."

"You haven't interfered?"

His voice harshened and his eyes flashed. With Urza,
madness was never more than a moment away.

"You said I mustn't, and I obey. You should look for
yourself. Now is the time-"

"Perhaps. I dare not move too soon. The land remembers;
there can be no mistakes. I must have cause. I must be very
careful, Xantcha. If I reveal myself too soon, I foresee
disaster. We must weigh our choices carefully."

Retorts swirled in Xantcha's mind. It was never truly
we with Urza, but she'd made her choices long ago. "No one
will suspect, even if you used your true name and shape.
There've been a score of doom-saying Urzas on the road this
year alone. You've become the stuff of legends. No one
would believe you're you."