"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."
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.
"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
to have to let go of the sphere."
"No!" Ratepe's plea should have been a shout; it was a
barely coherent moan instead.
"I'll make another-"
"Too sick. Can't float."
She tried to ignite his spirit. "A little seasickness
won't kill you."
"Can't."
"Waste not, want not. I'm the one who can't swim! I'm
counting on you to keep me afloat until I can make another
sphere."
Ratepe slumped beside her. His face was gray and
sweaty. His eyes were closed. Whatever strength he had left
was dedicated to fighting the spasms in his gut. A little
bit of seasickness would kill them both if she released the
sphere. And if she didn't release it?
Xantcha tried to make it rise, but lifting the sphere
had always been something that simply happened as it formed
and not anything she'd ever consciously controlled.
"Urza," Ratepe said through clenched teeth. "Urza'll
come.
Your heart."
Urza had come when she'd nearly blown herself up with
the Phyrexian ambulator, but now she wasn't in any
immediate danger. The sky overhead was a brilliant blue,
and the sphere bobbed like a driftwood log.
"Sorry, Ratepe. If he didn't pull us out of that storm
we were riding, then he's not going to pull us out of here.
I'm not close enough to dying to get his attention."
"Gotta be a way."
Xantcha peeled Ratepe's sweat-soaked hair away from his
eyes. He'd said he loved her, in a moment of sheer panic,
of course, but there was a chance he'd been telling the
truth. Sexless, parentless newt that she was, Xantcha
didn't imagine she could love as born-folk did, but she
felt something for the miserable young man beside her that
she'd never felt before, something worth more than all her
books and other treasures.
"Hold on," she urged, grasping his hand. "I'll think of
something."
Xantcha couldn't think of anything she hadn't already
tried, and the sphere remained mired in the water. The
waves had lessened, and she enjoyed the gentle movement,
but Ratepe was as miserable as when the storm had dropped
them, and by the way he was sweating out his misery, he'd
be parched before long, too.
"Come morning, we'll be late," she said as the sky
darkened. "Maybe Urza will come looking for us, but maybe
not right away."
"Can't you ... do something ... to make him look?"
Ratepe asked.
A whole sentence exhausted him. He rested with his eyes
closed. Xantcha tried to tell Ratepe that the motion would
bother him less if he sat up and looked at the horizon, as
he'd learned to do when they were soaring. Ratepe insisted
the motions were totally dissimilar and refused to try.
"How does ... Urza know when you ... need him?"
"He doesn't," Xantcha answered. "When we were dodging
Phyrexians we stayed close, but the rest of the time, I
never gave much thought to needing Urza, and he certainly
never needed me."
"Never? Three thousand years ... and you never ...
needed each other?"
"Never."
Ratepe sighed and curled around his knees. He began to
shiver, a bad sign considering how warm the Sea of Laments
was in the summer. Xantcha tucked their blankets around
him, then, because she'd worked up a sweat herself, and
stripped off her outer tunic. It got tangled in her hair
and in the thong of a pendant she'd worn so long she'd
forgotten why she wore it.
"You can hit me now," she said, breaking the thong.
"What?"
"I said, you can hit me now ... or you can wait until
after we find out if this thing still works."
"What?"
"A long time ago-and I mean a long time ago-Urza did
make me an artifact that would get his attention. I used
something like it just once, before Urza invaded Phyrexia.
I have to break it."
That time Xantcha had crushed the little crystal
between two rocks. This time she tried biting it and broke
a tooth before it cracked. Waste not, want not. At least
she'd been farsighted enough to use her back teeth which
grew back quicker than the front ones.
That time, between the rocks, there'd been a small
flash of light as whatever power or sorcery Urza had sealed
within the crystal was released. This time Xantcha neither
saw nor felt anything, and when she examined the broken
pieces, they were lined with a sooty residue that didn't
look promising.
"How long?" Ratepe asked.
"A day before he got there with his dragon."
Ratepe groaned, "Too long."
Xantcha was inclined to agree. Urza must have come back
to the forest before he went after the dragon. He wouldn't
have taken the chance that the Phyrexians might get away,
and after he'd finished with the diggers, he'd known where
the ambulator was. If Urza was going to haul them out of
the Sea of Laments, they'd be on dry land before moonrise.
If the crystal hadn't lost its power. If Urza recognized
its signal and remembered what it meant.
Those were worries Xantcha kept to herself. The stars
came out. Xantcha began to fear the worst, at least about
Urza, and for Ratepe. They had enough food and water for
two more days. Taking advantage of her newt's resilience,
Xantcha could get to land either way. She wasn't sure about
Ratepe.
It would be a stupid way for anyone to die, but the
same could be said about most deaths.
Ratepe fell asleep. His breathing steadied, his skin
grew warmer and drier. He might be over his seasickness by
morning; he had adapted to soaring, and there was nothing
to be gained by premature despair. Xantcha settled in
around him. It was remarkable that two bodies could be more
comfortable curled around each other than either was alone.
She closed her eyes.
Xantcha woke up with a stabbing pain in her gut, water
sloshing against her armpits, and Urza shouting in her ear:
"What misbegotten scheme put you in the middle of an
ocean!" He had her by the nape of the neck, like a cat
carrying a kitten, and held Ratepe the same way. The sphere
was burst, obviously. Xantcha knew she should yawn out the
armor, but Urza moved too fast. They were a split instant
between-worlds, a heartbeat longer in the wintry winds of a
nearby world, then back through the between-worlds to the
cottage. Xantcha was gasping, mostly because Urza dropped
her before turning his attention to Ratepe who'd turned
blue during the three-stride 'walk. She knew his color
because they'd traveled west and the sun wasn't close to
setting behind the Ohran Ridge.
A bit of healing and a few sips from a green bottle off
Urza's shelves brought Ratepe around.
"Change your clothes, Brother," Urza commanded in a
tone that had surely started battles in their long-ago
nursery. "Wash. Get something to eat. Xantcha and I need to
talk."
Mishra, of course, stood his ground. "Don't blame
Xantcha, and don't think you can ignore me ... again. I'm
the one who wanted to see Koilos."
Ratepe pronounced the word in the old-fashioned way.
Xantcha dared a glance at Urza's eyes, thinking her lover
was getting advice from the Weakstone. Both of Urza's eyes
were glossy black from lid to lid. She hadn't seen them
like that since they'd left Phyrexia, which made her think
of Oix and the Thran and a score of other things she
quickly stifled. Xantcha tried to catch Ratepe's eye and
pass him a warning to tread cautiously, if he couldn't
figure that for himself.
With his bold remark, Ratepe had effectively changed
the landscape of recrimination. If Xantcha could have
seized control of the argument at that moment, she could
have guaranteed there'd be no revelations about the fate of
the Thran. If she could have seized control. She didn't
catch Ratepe's eye, and Urza had lost interest in her as
well.
"Koilos is dead. There's nothing left. We took it all,
Brother. Us and the Phyrexians," Urza said, leaving Xantcha
to wonder if he'd visited the cave since his return to
Dominaria.
"I needed to see it with my own eyes," Ratepe replied,
a comment that, considering the circumstances, could have
many layers of meaning. "You told me to go away for a
while, so I did."
"I never meant you to go to Koilos. If it was Koilos
you wanted, we could have gone together."
"That was never a good idea, Urza," Ratepe said with
finality as he walked out the open door, following the
near-orders Urza had already given.
"You should have stopped him," Urza hissed at Xantcha
when they were alone. "My brother is ... fragile. Koilos
could have torn him apart."
"It's just another place, Urza," Xantcha countered,
resisting the urge to add that Ratepe was just another man.
Neither statement was true. After a year on the Ohran
Ridge, Ratepe might not be Mishra, but he'd become more
than a willful, onetime slave.
" 'Just another place,' " Urza mocked her. "For one
like you, yes, I suppose it would be. What would you see? A
cave, some ruins? What did my brother see? He isn't quite
himself yet. The next one will be better, stronger. I
expected it would be several Mishras before I'd take one
back to Koilos."
"There won't be another Mishra, Urza."
Urza turned away. He puttered at his worktable,
scraping up residues and dumping them in a bucket. He'd
been working on something when the crystal struck his mind.
Xantcha's anger, always quick to flare, was also quick to
fade.
"Thank you for picking us out of the ocean."
"I didn't know at first. It took me a moment to
remember what it was that I was hearing. I made that
crystal for you so long ago, when I still thought I could
invade and destroy Phyrexia. My ambitions have grown
smaller. Since Equilor, it's all I can do to protect
Dominaria from them. I'll make you another."