"Urza, I have to talk to you-"
"Problems in Russiore? Are they in the midst of a famine?"
"Not exactly. I didn't have time to scrounge supplies. Something came up-"
"Not to worry. I have other plans, anyway. We'll talk at the cot-tage."
He seized Xantcha's wrist, and before she could protest they were between-worlds. The journey was swift, as always. Two strides through nothing, and they were on the Ohran ridge. It was also, as always, disorienting. Urza stepped out several hundred paces from the cottage to give Xantcha a chance to gather her wits before they greeted Ratepe.
Xantcha's nerves reassembled themselves slowly, in part because she had to assure herself that the cottage was unharmed. Urza had gotten ahead of her. She ran to catch up.
"Urza, I said we have to talk. There's a problem. You. Ratepe. Your brother. The spiders-" All her carefully rehearsed statements had vanished in the between-worlds.
"I've thought it through. I can do the work of all three of us for the next nine days. I'll distribute the artifacts that he's made for us, yours and mine together, and get the next batch assembled. It's another aspect of time: I'll live a little faster. It's good practice, crawling before walking. The spiders won't end this war, Xantcha. They'll only buy time until I solve the Phyrexian problem at its source."
Urza had gotten over his obsession with righting his brother's fate, but he still talked of traveling back in time, much further back in time. Urza wanted to meet the Thran and fight beside them in their final battle against the Phyrexians. He thought they might know enemy's true home and, although he didn't say it, Xantcha believed Urza hoped go behind the Thran, all the way to the Phyrexians' first world to annihilate rather than exile them.
Gix had said the Thran were waiting. The demon could have rummaged the name out of her memories or out of Mishra
during the war. Almost certainly Gix wasn't telling the truth; at least not the important parts of it, but Urza needed to know what had happened in the catacomb beneath Avohir's temple in Pincar City.
"I met ... I found ..." She was still tongue-tied. Had the demon left something in her that left her able to think but not to speak? It wasn't impossible. Gix savored fear spiced with helplessness and frustration. She didn't know the measure of the red light's power, but she'd lost an entire afternoon in the catacomb, and when Ratepe burst out of memory to save her, she'd been doing the unthinkable: walking toward Phyrexia.
"Xantcha?" Urza stopped. He faced her and gave her his full attention.
"We have to go back to Pincar City."
"No, Efuan Pincar is out of the question. Anywhere we've found sleepers is out of the question. You and he have to go someplace, of course. I don't want anyone around while I'm working this time. I could wait. I should wait until after the Glimmer Moon rises. We can never know the future, Xantcha. I'm sure of that. Only the past is forever, and only now gives us choices. I choose to give the next nine days to you and him so you will always have them. Tell me where you want to be, and I'll 'walk you both there in the morning."
Nine days. Nine days in hiding while she sorted out her tangled thoughts? It was the coward's way, but Xantcha seized it. "I'll talk to him." A lie. Xantcha could feel that confessing to Ratepe would be no easier than confessing to Urza. "We'll decide where we want to go."
Ratepe welcomed them with the enthusiasm and relief of any talkative youth who'd kept company with himself for entirely too long. He cast several inquiring glances Xantcha's way. She pretended not to notice them while Urza announced his intention to reclaim his workroom for the next nine days.
"You told Urza," Ratepe snapped to Xantcha the moment they were alone together. "Now he's taking over everything! Just tell me, did you get my artifacts attached to Avohir's altar?"
"One," Xantcha answered truthfully. "There were sleepers in the temple, made up as Shratta. And Shratta dead in the catacombs. They were finished years ago, Ratepe. If there are Shratta left, they're like the Efuands in the Red-Stripes. They're in league, consciously or not, with Phyrexia." She thought of Gix; this wasn't the time to tell him, not when they were both angry. "I put your shatter-spiders, and screamers, too, in places where the glistening scent was strong. I didn't get to the barracks."
Ratepe threw his head back and swore at the ceiling. "What were you thinking! I don't want to bring Avohir's sanctuary down-not while the Red-Stripe barracks is still standing!" He shook his head and stood with his back to her. "When it wasn't what I expected, you should've waited. Sweet Avohir, what did you tell Urza?"
Xantcha's guilt and anxiety evaporated. "I didn't tell him anything!" she shouted.
"Then keep your voice down!"
"Stop telling me what to do!"
They were on opposite sides of the table, ready to
lunge at each other, and not with the passion that normally accompanied their reunions. Ratepe seemed to have outrun himself. Jaw clenched, eyes pleading, he looked across the table, but Xantcha was similarly paralyzed. It was her nature, created in Phyrexia and shaped over time in Urza's company, to back down or explode when cornered. This was a moment when she couldn't see a clear path in either direction.
The door was at her back. Xantcha ducked and ran out, leaving it open behind her, listening for the sounds that never came. She settled in the darkness, wrestling with her conscience, until the lamps in her shared room had flickered and died. Approaching the door through starlight, she saw a dark silhouette at the table, where Ratepe had fallen asleep with his head on his arms. She crept past him, as silently as she'd crept toward the Pincar catacomb. Her bed was strung with a creaking rope mattress. Xantcha quietly tucked herself in a corner by her treasure chest.
Ratepe was sprawled on the bed when she awoke. Urza was in the doorway, the golden light of dawn behind him.
"Are you ready to "walk?" he asked.
Urza never came into her side of the cottage. Perhaps he thought she'd been sleeping in the corner since Ratepe arrived. They weren't ready to 'walk anyway; Ratepe wasn't ready to wake up. He was cross-grained from the moment his eyes opened. Xantcha expected him to start something they'd all regret, but instead he just said, "You decide," as he slipped past Urza on his way to the well.
"We don't need you to 'walk us anywhere," Xantcha said to Urza as she stretched the kinks out of her legs. Her foot felt as if her boot was lined with hot, sharp needles.
"I don't want you near here while I work."
"We won't be."
"Don't dawdle, then. I want to get started!"
Ratepe stayed away while Xantcha rearranged her traveling gear. She packed a good deal of gold and silver, which could be traded wherever they went, but included copper, too, in case they got no farther than their closest neighbors along the frontier between the ridge and the coast. She threw in flour for journey bread, as well, and thought about the hunter's bow suspended from the rafters. Nine days could be an uncomfortably long time to live off journey bread, but a bow could be troublesome in a city. In the end Xantcha put a few more coins in her belt purse, left the bow on its hook, and met a sulking Ratepe beside the well.
Urza either didn't notice or didn't care that Xantcha and Ratepe were scarcely speaking to each other. He'd been away from his workroom for nearly a half-year and didn't wait to see the sphere rise before sealing himself in with his ideas.
The morning sun was framed with fair weather clouds against a rich blue sky. Prairie wildflowers blanketed the land above which the sphere soared. It was difficult, in the face of such natural beauty, to remain sullen and sour, but Xantcha and Ratepe both rose to the challenge. A northwest wind stream caught the sphere and carried it toward Kovria, southeast of the ridge. There was nothing in the Kovrian barrens to hold Xantcha's attention, no destinations worth mentioning, but changing their course