Planeswalker

Shredding a double handful of peat into the brazier beneath the table, Xantcha found, as she often did, the squishy remains of an acorn: a reminder of just how much Urza and his brother had changed their world with their war. When whole, the acorn would have been as large as her fist, and the tree that had dropped it would have had a trunk as broad as the cottage was wide. She crumbed the acorn with the rest and stirred the coals until palpable heat radiated from the iron bucket.

Xantcha forgot the table and hit her head hard as she stood. She sat a moment, rubbing her scalp and muttering curses, until she remembered the candlestick. With a louder curse, she scrabbled to her feet. Waste not, want not, it hadn't toppled. Her book was safe.

She returned to her stool and opened to a random page. Kayla's portrait stared back at her: dusky, sloe-eyed, and seductive. Xantcha owned four illustrated copies of The Antiquity Wars. Each one depicted Kayla differently. Her favorite showed Una's wife as a tall, graceful and voluptuous woman with long blond hair, but

Xantcha knew none of the portraits were accurate. Staring at the shutters, she tried to imagine the face of the woman who had known, and perhaps loved, Urza the Artificer while he was a mortal man.

One thing was certain, Xantcha didn't resemble Kayla Bin-Kroog. There were no extravagant curves in Xantcha's candlelit silhouette. She was short, not tall, and her hair was a very drab brown, which she cropped raggedly around a face that was more angular than attractive. Xantcha could, and usually did, pass herself off as a slight youth awaiting his full growth and first beard. Still, Xantcha thought, she and Kayla would have been friends. Life had forced many of the same hard lessons down their throats.

Kayla, however, wasn't the epic character who intrigued Xantcha most. That honor went to Urza's brother, Mishra. Three of Xantcha's illustrated volumes depicted Mishra as a whip-lean man with hard eyes. The fourth portrayed him as soft and lazy, like an overfed cat. Neither type matched Kayla's word picture. To Kayla, Mishra had been tall and powerful, with straight black hair worn wild and full. Mishra's smile, his sister-by-law had written, was warm and bright as the sun on Midsummer's day, and his eyes sparkled with wit-when they weren't flashing full of suspicion.

Not all The Antiquity Wars in Xantcha's collection included Kayla's almost indiscreet portrait of her husband's brother. Some scribes had openly seized an opportunity to take a moral stance, not only against Mishra, but other men of more recent vintage- as if a

princess of ancient Yotia could have foreseen the vices of the Samisar of Evean or Ninkin the Bold! One scribe, writing in the year 2657 admitted that she'd omitted the Mishra section entirely, because it was inconsistent with Kayla's loyalty to her husband and, therefore, a likely fraud-and absolutely inappropriate for the education of the young prince, who was expected to learn his statecraft from her copy of the epic.

Xantcha wondered if that priggish scribe had seen the picture on her table. The Kayla Bin-Kroog of Xantcha's oldest copy wore a veil, three pearl ropes, and very little else. Few men could have resisted her allure. One of them had been her husband. Beyond doubt, Urza had neglected his wife. No woman had ever intrigued

Urza half as much as his artifacts. How many evenings might Kayla have gone to bed railing at the fates who'd sent the chaste Urza to her father's palace, rather than his charming brother?

Urza had never questioned his wife's fidelity. At least, Xantcha had never heard him raise that question. Then again, the man who lived and worked on the other side of the wall at Xantcha's back had never mentioned his son or grandson, either.

With a sigh and a yawn, Xantcha stowed the book in a chest that had no lock. They didn't need locks in the absolute middle of nowhere. Urza had the power to protect them from anything. The heavy lid served only to discourage the mice that would otherwise have devoured the vellum.

"Xantcha!" Urza's voice came through the wall; as she contemplated the precious library she'd accumulated over the last two and a half centuries

She leapt instantly to her feet. The lid fell with a bang. Urza had shut himself in his workroom while she'd been off scrounging, and she'd known better than to interrupt him when she'd returned. Sixteen days had passed since she'd heard his voice.

Their cottage had two rooms: hers, which had begun as a shed around an outdoor bread oven, and Urza's, which consumed everything under the original roof, a dugout cellar and a storage alcove-Urza traveled light but settled deep. Each room had a door to a common porch whose thatched roof provided some protection from the weather.

Wind-driven sleet pelted her as Xantcha darted down the porch. She shoved the door shut behind her, then, when Urza hadn't noticed the sound or draft, took his measure before approaching him.

Urza the great artificer sat at a high table on a stool identical to her own. By candlelight, Xantcha saw that he was dressed in the same tattered blue tunic he'd been wearing when she'd last seen him. His ash-blond hair spewed from the thong meant to confine it at the nape of his neck. It wasn't dirty-not the way her hair would have gotten foul if it went that long between washings. Urza didn't sweat or purge himself in any of the usual ways. He didn't breathe when he was rapt in his studies and never needed to eat, though he spoke in the mortal way and ate heartily sometimes, if she'd cooked something that appealed to him. He drank water, never caring where it came from or how long it had stood stagnant, but the slops bucket beside his door never needed emptying. Urza didn't get tired either, which

was a more serious problem because he remained man enough to need sleep and dreams for the purging of his thoughts.

There were times when Xantcha believed that all Urza's thoughts needed purging; this was one of them.

Mountains rose from Urza's table. All too familiar mountains shaped from clay and crockery. Quicksilver streams overflowed the corners. As melting sleet trickled down her spine, Xantcha wondered if she could retreat and pretend she hadn't heard. She judged that she could have, but didn't.

"I've come," she a

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.