Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

"You'll stay right here?" she asked.

"I'll try."

Xantcha didn't ask what he meant. She'd set her feet on enough worlds to have a sharp sense of where she could survive and where she couldn't. Phyrexia and the three worlds after Phyrexia were inhospitable, but this three- moon world was viable. She had her cyst, her heart, and, tucked inside her tunic, an ambulator. If Urza vanished before she returned, it wouldn't be the end of her.

Heavy rains had fallen recently. Xantcha saw water at the base of the hill where they emerged from between- worlds. Carrying it was another matter. She quenched her thirst from her own cupped hands, but for Urza she stripped off her tunic, sopped it in the water, and carried it, dripping, up the hill.

Urza's attempt to remain seated atop the rock had been successful. Silhouetted against the softly lit night sky, his shoulders were slumped forward, and his chin had disappeared in the shadows of his armored tunic. His hands lay inert in his lap.

"Urza?"

His chin rose.

"I've brought you water, without grace or dignity."

"As long as it is wet."

She guided his hand to the sopping cloth. "Quite wet."

Urza sucked moisture from the cloth, then wiped his face. When he'd finished, he let her tunic fall. Xantcha sat at his feet.

"Is there anything more I can do for you? Will you eat? Food might help. I smell berries. It's summer here."

He shook his head. "Just sit beside me. Sleep, if you can, child. Morning will come, a summer morning."

Xantcha fought into her tunic. The night was cool, not cold. The garment was uncomfortable, nothing worse. Discomfort was nothing unfamiliar. She got comfortable against the rock. Urza shifted his hand to the top of her head.

"I told you to stay behind."

"I did, for a little while."

"You could have been hurt. I might have left you in Phyrexia forever."

Urza was Urza, at the very center of his world and every other. On a night like this, after the day they'd survived, his vainglory was reassuring. Xantcha relaxed.

"It went otherwise, Urza. I was neither hurt nor left behind."

"I'd still be there but for you."

"You'd be dead, Urza, if you can die, or in the Seventh Sphere, if you can't, wishing that you could."

"The Seventh Sphere is the place where-" He hesitated. "Where the Ineffable punishes demons?"

"Yes."

"Then I should thank you."

"Yes," Xantcha repeated. "And you should have listened to me when I told you what waited in Phyrexia."

"I will build another dragon, bigger and stronger. I know where

Phyrexia is now, tucked across a fathomless chasm. I would never have seen it 'walking. I wouldn't see it now, but I know and I can go back. They will die, Xantcha. I will reap them like a field of overripe grain. The day of Mishra's vengeance is closer today than yesterday."

Xantcha swallowed an ordinary yawn. "You were surrounded, Urza. The fourth leg went right after I climbed it. You'd destroyed hundreds of Phyrexians, and yet there were as many around you at the end as there had been at the beginning."

"I will change my design."

"A thousand legs wouldn't be enough. You can't destroy every Phyrexian by fighting. You'll need allies and an army three times the size of Phyrexia. Tactics. Strategy." Xantcha thought of the heart vault. "Or, the perfect target for a stealthy attack."

"And since when did you become my war consul, child?"

Urza could be disdainful. Strategy and tactics indeed. She'd need be careful when she mentioned the heart vault. Tonight, while Urza was blind and she was exhausted, wasn't the right time to reveal her discoveries. Another yawn escaped, entirely normal. Without the mnemonic, the cyst was just a lump in her stomach.

"Sleep, child. I am grateful. I underestimated my enemy. I'll never do that again."

Xantcha was too tired to celebrate what little victory she'd achieved. She fell asleep thinking she'd be alone when she awoke.

She was, but Urza hadn't gone far. With nothing more than grass, twigs and small stones, Xantcha's companion had recreated the Fourth Sphere battleground in an area no more than two-paces square. His dragon, made from twigs and woven grass, towered over the other replicas in precisely the proportions she remembered. She expected it to move.

"I'm awed," she admitted before her shadow fell across Urza's small wonders. "You must be feeling better?"

"As good as a fool can feel."

It was a comment that begged questions, but Xantcha had learned to tread softly through confusion. "You can see again?"

"Yes, yes." He looked up: black pupils, hazel irises, white sclera. "You had the right of it, Xantcha. Burn that name out of my mind.

As soon as I did, I began to feel like myself again, ignorant and foolish. No one was hurt. No planes were damaged."

"A few spheres. The priests will be a long time repairing the damage. And you destroyed a score of their dragons and wyverns. Better than I expected, honestly."

"But not good enough. If I'd come down here-" Urza touched the ground behind the stone-shaped furnaces then quickly rearranged the delicate figures-"I'd have had a

wall of fire at my back, and they couldn't have encircled me."

Xantcha studied the new array. "How would that be better? With the furnaces behind you, you'd have been held in one place almost from the start." Urza gave her a look that sparkled. She changed the subject. "Are we staying here while you build another dragon?"

"No. The multiverse is real, Xantcha. At least every plane I'd ever found before was real, until yesterday when I found Phyrexia. Going there and leaving, those were 'walking strides like I've never taken before. It was as if I'd leapt a vast chasm in a single bound. The chasm, I realize now, is everywhere, and Phyrexia is its far side. No matter where we are, we're only one leap away from our enemy and it from us. Even so, I'll feel better when I've put a few knots in my trail."

She had no argument with that plan. "Then what? Another dragon? An army? Allies? I found something yesterday, Urza, something I thought was probably lies. I found my heart."

Xantcha slid her hand into her boot. The amber continued to glow. She offered it to Urza.

"That is-well, it's not your heart, Xantcha." He didn't take it. "Your heart beats behind your ribs, child. The Phyrexians lied to you. They took your past and your future, but they didn't take your heart." Urza guided her empty hand to her breastbone. "There, can you feel it?"

She nodded. All flesh had a blood-heart in its breast. Newts in the Fane of Flesh had hearts until they were compleated. "This is different," she insisted and described the vault where countless hearts shimmered. "We are connected to our hearts. We are taught that the Ineffable keeps watch over our hearts and records our errors on their surface. Too many errors and-" She drew a line across her throat.

Urza took the amber and held it to the sun. Xantcha couldn't see his face or his eyes but a strangeness not unlike the between-worlds tightened around her. She couldn't breathe, couldn't even muster the strength or will to gasp until Urza lowered his hand. His face, when he turned toward her again, was not pleased.

"Of all abominations, this is the greatest." Urza held the amber above her still-outstretched hand but did not release it. "I would not call it a heart, yet it falls short of a powerstone. I can imagine no purpose for it, except the one you describe. And you knew where the vault was?"

Xantcha sensed Urza had asked a critical question and that her life might depend on her answer. She would have lied, if she'd been certain a lie would satisfy him. "I knew it was somewhere in the Fane of Flesh."

"You didn't tell me?"

"I didn't want to die with all the rest of Phyrexia. I wasn't certain. I thought you'd laugh and call me a child again, and I would have been too ashamed to follow you."