by Lynn Abbey
"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.
CHAPTER 15
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 qu
iet.
"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. Ken
idiern 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?"