by Lynn Abbey
Urza spun quickly on the stool, too quickly for her eyes to follow his movement. Indeed, he hadn't moved, he'd reshaped himself. It was never a good sign when Urza forgot his body. Meeting his eyes confirmed Xantcha's suspicions. They glowed with their own facet-rainbow light.
"You summoned me?"
He blinked and his eyes turned mortal, dark irises within white sclera. But that was the illusion; the other was real.
"Yes, yes! Come see, Xantcha. Look at what has been revealed."
She'd sooner have entered the ninth sphere of Phyrexia. Well, perhaps not the ninth sphere, but the seventh, certainly.
"Come. Come! It's not like the last time."
At least he remembered the last time when the mountains had exploded.
Xantcha crossed the narrows of the oblong room until she stood at arm's length from the table. Contrary to his assurance, it was like the last time, exactly like the last time and the time before that. He'd recreated the plain of the river Kor below the Kher Ridge and covered the plain with gnats. She kept her distance.
"I'm no judge, Urza, but to my poor eyes it looks .. . similar."
"You must get closer." He offered her a glass lens set in an ivory ring.
It might have been seething poison for the enthusiasm with which she took it. He offered her his stool. When that didn't entice her, he grabbed her arm and pulled. Xantcha clambered onto the stool and bent over the table with the glass between her and the gnats.
Despite reluctance and reservation, Xantcha let out an awed sigh; as an artificer, Una was incomparable. What had appeared to be gnats were, as she had known they would be, tiny automata, each perfectly formed and unique. In addition to men and women, there were horses, their tails swishing in imperceptible breezes, harnessed to minuscule carts. She didn't doubt that each was surrounded by a cloud of flies that the glass could not resolve. Nothing on the table was alive. Urza was adamant that his artifacts remained within what he called "the supreme principle of the Thran." Artifacts were engines in service to life, never life itself, and never, ever, sentient.
Bright tents pimpled Urza's table landscape. There were even miniature reproductions of the artifacts he and his brother had brought to the place and time that Kayla had
called "The Dawn of Fire."
Xantcha focused her attention on the automata. She found Mishra's shiny dragon engine, a ground-bound bumblebee among the gnats and Urza's delicate ornithopters. When Xantcha saw an ornithopter spread its wings and rise above the table, she was confident that she'd seen the reason for Urza's summons. Miniaturizing those early artifacts had been a greater challenge than creating the swarms of tiny men and women who milled around them.
"You've got them flying!"
Urza pushed her aside. His eyes required no polished glass assistance; he could most likely see the horseflies, the fleas, and the worms as well. Xantcha noticed that he was frowning.
"It's very good," she assured him, fearing that her initial response hadn't been sincere enough.
"No, no! You were looking in the wrong place, Xantcha. Look here-" He positioned her hands above the largest tent. "What do you see now?"
"Blue cloth," she replied, knowing full well that within the tent, automata representing Urza and the major characters of Kayla's epic were midway through a scene she'd observed many times before. At first she'd been curious to see how Urza's script might differ from his wife's, but not any more.
Urza muttered something-it was probably just as well that Xantcha didn't quite catch it-and the blue cloth became a shadow through which the automata could be clearly seen. There was Urza, accurate down to the same blue shirt and threadbare trousers. His master-student, Tawnos, stood nearby, a half head taller than the rest. The Kroog warlord, the Fallaji qadir and a score of others, all moving as if they were alive and oblivious to the huge face hovering overhead. Mishra was in the shadowed tent too, but Urza was peculiar about his younger brother's gnat. While all the others had mortal features, Mishra was never more than wisps of metal at the qadir's side.
"Is it the second morning?" Xantcha asked. Urza was breathing down her neck, expecting conversation. She hoped he didn't intend to show her the assassinations. Suffering, even of automata, repelled her.
Another grumble from Urza, then, "Look for Ashnod!"
According to The Antiquity Wars, auburn-haired Ashnod wasn't at "The Dawn of Fire," but Urza always made a gnat in her image. He'd put it on the table, where it did nothing except get in the way of the others. To appease her hovering companion, Xantcha moved the glass slightly and found a red-capped dot in the shadow of another tent.
"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."
A rare smile lit up her companion's face. "That bad still?"
"Worse. But please, go to Baszerat and Morvern. A quarrel has become a war. So it began with the Fallaji and the Yotians. Who knows, there might be brothers.... You've been up here too long, Urza."
Urza reached into her mind again, gathering landmarks and languages, which she willingly surrendered. Then, in a blink's time, she was back into her own proper consciousness. Urza faded into the between-worlds, which was, among other things, the fastest way to travel across the surface of a single world.