Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

"Urza's never mentioned them. I just assumed Koilos vanished with Argoth."

"You've seen a map of what's left of Terisiare?"

Xantcha shrugged. There were maps in her copies of The Antiquity Wars. She'd assumed they were wrong and paid no attention to them.

"We'd have to go over the Sea of Laments. We'd never make it there and back in nine days," Ratepe said with a smile that invited conspiracy. Waste not, want not. If Gix hadn't lied about the young Efuand, they were all doomed.

"We'd make landfall on Argivia in two very cold days and colder nights. Getting back would be more difficult, but it's that or go back to the cottage and tell Urza that I saw Gix in Pincar City."

"He wouldn't be pleased to see us."

The journey over the Sea of Laments was as uneventful as it was unpleasant. They'd traded for blankets and an oil-cloth sail in a village on Gulmany's south coast. The fisherman who took Xantcha's silver thought she was insane; a little while later, both Ratepe and Xantcha agreed with him, but by then it was too late. They were in the wash of a roaring wind river and remained there until they saw land again. For two days and nights there was nothing to do but huddle beneath blankets and the sail.

"Don't you have to keep one hand free?" Ratepe had shouted early on, as they struggled to wrap the blankets evenly around their feet.

"Tack across this?' she shouted back. "We're here for the ride."

"How many times have you crossed the sea?"

"Once, by mistake."

"Sorry I asked."

Misery ended after sunrise on the third day. There was land below, land as far as the eye could see. Xantcha thought down and thrust her hand through the sphere for good measure. Her hand turned white as they plummeted down to familiar altitudes.

As her hand began to thaw, Xantcha asked, "Now, which

way to Koilos?"

"Where are we?"

"Don't you recognize anything from your maps?"

"Avohir's sweet mercy, Xantcha, maps don't look like the ground!"

They found an oasis and a goatherd who seemed unfazed by the sight of two strangers in a place where strangers couldn't be common. He spoke a language neither of them had heard before but recognized the word Koilos in its older, three-syllable form. He rattled off a long speech before pointing to the southeast. The only words they recognized, beside Koilos, were Urza and Mishra. Xantcha traded a silver-set agate for all the food the youth was carrying. He strode away, whistling and laughing.

"What do you think he said?" Xantcha asked when they'd returned to the gulch where their gear was hidden. "Other than that we're fools and idiots."

"The usual curses against Urza and Mishra."

The sphere flowed over them and they were rising before Ratepe continued.

"Haven't you ever noticed how empty everything is? Even in Efuan Pincar, which was as far from Argoth as it could be, it's nothing to ride through wilderness and find yourself in the middle of ruins from the time before the ice and the war. Here in Argivia, according to the books the Ancestors brought to Pincar, they were still living in the shadows of the past-literally. They didn't have the wherewithal to build the buildings like the old ruins. Not enough people, not enough stone, not enough metal, not enough knowledge of how it was done. Urza talks about the mysteries of the Thran. The books my father studied talked about the mysteries of Urza and Mishra. They all talk about Koilos. It's the place in Terisiare, new or old, where everything comes to an end. It's a name to conjure darkness."

Xantcha caught a tamer wind stream and adjusted their drift. "Does everyone in Efuan Pincar talk about such things? Are you a nation of storytellers?"

Ratepe laughed bitterly. "No, just my father, and he taught me. My rather was a scholar, and both my grandfathers, too. The first things I remember are the three of them arguing about men and women who'd died a thousand years ago. I was ashamed of them. I hated lessons; I wanted to be anything but a scholar. Then the Shratta came. My grandfathers were dead by then, Avohir's mercy. My father did whatever he had to do to take care of us. When we got to the country, he learned farming as if it were a Sumifan chronicle, but he missed Pincar. He missed not having students to teach or someone to argue with. My mother told me to sit at his feet and learn or she'd take her belt to me. I never argued with my mother." Xantcha stared at Ratepe who was staring at the horizon, eyes glazed and fists clenched, the way he looked whenever he remembered what he'd lost. Urza had buried Mishra beneath layers of obsession, and there was little enough in Xantcha's own life worth cherishing. Looking at Ratepe, trying to imagine his grief, all she felt was envy.

The winds were steady, the sky was clear, and the moon was bright. They soared until midnight and were in the air again after a sunrise breakfast. By midday they saw the

reflection of a giant lake to their south, and by the end of a long afternoon they were over the foothills of the Kher Ridge. There were no villages, no roads, not even the bright green dot of an oasis. Ratepe closed his eyes and folded his hands. "Now what?" Xantcha asked. "I'm praying for a sign." "I thought you knew!"

"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.