"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?"
"We can't walk to the edge of an island. I don't think we can walk out from under the one overhead. I tried, Xantcha, before you woke up. I tried to abandon you. I knew when you walked away that you'd have to come back."
"No apologies. Pd've done the same," Xantcha said and offered her hand again. "Come on. I've lived with worlds over my head, but not this close. Makes me nervous."
Sosinna reached, and winced as the gash on her arm began bleeding again. It was ugly now and would only get worse if they didn't find water soon. Xantcha hadn't seen free-running water since she'd first opened her eyes in Serra's realm, but now that Sosinna was moving again, she didn't seem worried about her wounds, so Xantcha said nothing either.
Xantcha kept an eye on the island overhead to measure their progress. The lethargy that had slowed her on her previous walk was worse. They weren't covering ground the way she would have liked. Even so, they were getting nowhere relative to the convoluted underside above them. Sosinna looked at her every time she looked up, a look that expected concessions and defeat, but Xantcha kept walking.
Sosinna's remarks about black mana had confirmed Xantcha's suspicion that Serra's floating-island realm was a magical place, as unnatural in its way as Phyrexia. The forces that made Phyrexia a world of concentric spheres were as inexplicable as the ones that shaped Serra's realm into thousands of floating islands ... and, perhaps, not all that different from each other. She'd have questions for Urza when they met again. If they met again. If she and Sosinna could walk to a place where the opening between the collided islands was large enough that she'd risk casting them adrift in the sphere.
The thought of waking up the cyst brought an end to gut numbness. Xantcha dropped to one knee.
"The archangels will find us," Sosinna said, not the words Xantcha wanted to hear at that moment. "Every time you call on black mana, it brings them closer."
"I didn't call on black mana," Xantcha insisted.
Xantcha used a mnemonic to awaken Urza's artifact. She didn't know how the cyst made the sphere or armor. Urza knew mana-based sorcery; the necessary insights had come with his eyes. He said the Thran hadn't used mana so he wouldn't either, but the Thran had made Urza's eyes. Sosinna thought Xantcha imagined dark corners. Xantcha didn't need imagination so long as she had Urza.
The pain had faded, and numbness returned. Xantcha's legs were leaden when she stood. She could barely lift her feet when she tried to walk. "There's got to be another way."
"We wait until the archangels find us. There is no other way."
"Is your lady sensitive to black mana, or just the archangels?"
"Black mana has no place here. It hurts. We can all feel it, the Lady most of all. She is aware of the whole realm as you are aware of your body. The archangels patrol the islands looking for black mana and other evil miasmas. They eliminate evil before it can affect the Lady, but when they found you and the other-Urza- together, they called Lady Serra for a judgment. You've already been judged. When the archangels find us, they won't call Lady Serra again. They won't risk her health. None of us would risk it. If the Lady sickened, we would all die."
Another unfortunate choice of words, given the state of Xantcha's gut, but she had an idea. "I'm going to get everyone's attention, the archangels and, with any luck, your Lady herself."
Xantcha yawned and thought the mnemonic for her armor. At first there was nothing, and she thought she'd lost the cyst altogether. Then the pain began and she felt something acid rising through her throat. Sosinna screamed, but by then Xantcha couldn't have stopped the process if she'd wanted to. The armor burned as it flowed over her skin. It spared her eyes. When Xantcha looked down what she saw was blacker than the darkest night, as black and featureless as the walls of an unlit cave. She brought her hands together, saw them touch, and felt absolutely nothing.
"You got the archangels, that's all." Sosinna pointed through the narrow opening between the islands. "We're doomed."
Sosinna stood no more than two arm's lengths away, but with the black armor covering Xantcha's ears, she sounded distant and under water. Xantcha looked in the indicated direction. A dazzling white diamond had appeared in the ribbon of golden light between the two islands. A moment's observation revealed that it was growing, moving toward them at considerable speed. From the air, then, the floating islands had edges. It was only from the ground that the horizon never became an edge.
As the diamond grew larger, it became apparent that it had five parts: four smaller lights, one each in the narrow and oblique points, and a much larger light in the center.
"The Aegis," Sosinna said.
The Aegis was also diamond shaped and too bright to look at directly. Xantcha held her black-armored hand in front of her eyes and squinted through the pinhole gaps between her fingers. She saw writhing plumes of yellow fire emerging from a hole that reminded her of a portal, a
portal to the sun. Moving her hand slightly she observed the smaller lights, the archangels themselves: radiant, elongated creatures with dazzling wings that didn't move and smooth, featureless faces. They resembled Sosinna the same way many compleat Phyrexians resembled newts. Not an encouraging thought.
Xantcha didn't think Urza's armor, in its present condition, would be proof against the Aegis. She tried to say good-bye to Sosinna and discovered the armor had taken away her voice.
Wind preceded the archangels. It shook boulders loose from the overhead island and lifted the island itself out of the way. One loosened boulder struck the ground so near to Xantcha's feet that she felt the ground shudder. The wind died when the archangels brought the Aegis to a hovering halt. As good warriors anywhere, the archangels tested their weapon before they put it to use. A beam of light as hot as a Phyrexian furnace and many times as bright seared the land directly below the Aegis. Then the beam began to move toward Xantcha and Sosinna.