"We may as well leave," she said when the afternoon was still young and Ratepe had just found a scrap of cloth.
"Leave? We haven't seen everything yet."
"There's no water, and we don't have a lot of food with us, unless you want to try some of that cheese. What's here to see?"
"I don't know. That's why we have to stay. I'm only
halfway around this room, and there's an open passage at the back! And I want to see Koilos by moonlight."
Urza's idea, in the beginning, had been to get her and Ratepe away from the cottage, to give them some time together. Koilos surely wasn't what Urza had in mind, but Ratepe was enjoying himself. Whether they left now or in the morning wasn't going to make much difference in the return trip to Gulmany, and considering what that journey home was going to take out of her, Xantcha decided she could use some rest.
"All right. Wake me at sunset, then."
Xantcha didn't think she'd fall asleep on the stone but she did until Ratepe shook her shoulder.
"Come see. It's really beautiful, in a stark way, like a giant's tomb."
Sunset light flooded through the cavern mouth. Ratepe had stirred enough dust to turn the air into ruddy curtains streaked with shadows. They walked hand in hand to the ledge where the path ended and the cavern began. The hollowed plateau appeared drenched in blood. Xantcha was transfixed by the sight, but Ratepe wanted her to turn around.
"There are carvings everywhere," he said. "They appeared like magic out of the shadows once the sunlight came in."
Xantcha turned and would have collapsed if Ratepe hadn't been holding her. "What's wrong?"
"It's writing, Ratepe. It's writing, and I can read it, most of it. It's like the lessons carved into the walls of the Fane of Flesh." "What does it say?"
"Names. Mostly names and numbers-places. Battles, who fought who... ." Her eyes followed the column carvings. She'd gone cold and scarcely had the strength to fill her lungs. "What names? Any that I'd recognize?"
"Gix," she said, though there was another that she recognized: Yawgmoth, which she didn't-couldn't-say aloud. "And Xantcha, among the numbers." "Phyrexian?" "Thran."
"We know they fought." Ratepe freed his fingers from her death grip.
Xantcha grabbed them again. "No, they didn't fight. Not the Phyrexians against the Thran. The Thran fought themselves." "You can't be reading it right."
"I'm reading it because it's the same writing that's carved in the walls of every Fane in Phyrexia! Some of the words are unfamiliar, but-Ratepe! My name is up there. My name is up there because Xantcha is a number carved in the floor of the Fane of Flesh to mark where I was supposed to stand!" She made the familiar marks in the dust then pointed to similar carvings on the cavern walls.
Ratepe resisted. "All right, maybe this was the Phyrexian stronghold and the Thran attacked it, instead of the other way around. I mean, nobody really knows."
"I know! It says Gix, the silver-something, strong- something of the Thran. Of the Thran, Ratepe. If Urza could go back in time, he'd find Oix here waiting for him. That's what Gix meant! Waste not, want not, Ratepe. Gix was here seven thousand years ago! He wasn't lying, not completely. Those are Thran powerstones that you and Urza call the Mightstone and the Weakstone. The stones made the brothers what they were, Ratepe, and Gix might well have made the
stones!"
"The Phyrexians stole powerstones from the Thran?"
"You're not listening!" Xantcha waved her arms at a heavily carved wall. "It's all there. Two factions. Sheep and pigs, Red-Stripes and Shratta, Urza and Mishra, take your pick. 'The glory and destiny is compleation'compleation, the word, Ratepe, the exact angle-for-angle word that's carved on the doors of the Fane of Flesh. And there." She pointed at another section. " 'Life served, never weakened' and the word Thran, Rat, is the first glyph of the word for life." She recited them in Phyrexian, so he could hear the similarities, as strong as the similarities between their pronunciation of Koilos. "If language drifts in three thousand years, imagine what it could do in seven, once everyone's compleat and only newts have flesh cords in their throats."
The sun had slipped below the mountain tops. The marks, the words, were fading. Xantcha turned in Ratepe's arms to face him.
"He's been wrong. All this time-almost all his lifeUrza's been wrong. The Phyrexians never invaded Dominaria! There was no Phyrexia until Gix and the Ineffable left here. Winners, losers, I can't tell. We knew that. We spent over a thousand years looking for the world where the Phyrexians came from, so we could learn from those who defeated them .. . and all the time, it was Urza's own world."
Xantcha was shaking, sobbing. Ratepe tried to comfort her, but it was too soon.
"Urza would say to me, that's Phyrexian, that's abomination. Only the Thran way is the right way, the pure way. And I always thought to myself, the difference isn't that great. The Phyrexians aren't evil because they're compleat. They'd be evil no matter what they were, and those automata he was making, he was growing them in a jar. Is it right to grow gnats in a jar but not newts in a vat?"
Ratepe held her tight against his chest before she pulled away. "The Red-Stripes and the Shratta were both bad luck for everybody who crossed either one of them," he said gently. "And so were Urza and Mishra. Any time there's only one right way, ordinary people get crushed-maybe even the Morvernish and the Baszerati."
"But all our lives, Ratepe. All our lives, we've been chasing shadows! It's like someone reached inside and pulled everything out."
"You just said it: the Phyrexians are evil. Urza's crazed, but he's not evil, and he's the only one here who can beat the Phyrexians at their own game. We wanted to find the truth. Well, it wasn't what we expected, but we found a truth. And we've still got to go back to Urza. The truth here doesn't change that, does it?"
"We can't tell him. If he knew his Thran weren't the great and noble heroes of Dominaria ... If he knew that the Thran destroyed Mishra ..."
"You're right, but Mishra would laugh. I can hear him."
"I can't believe that."
"It's laugh or cry, Xantcha." Ratepe dried her tears. "If you've truly wasted three thousand years and you're stuck fighting a war that was stupid four thousand years before that, then either you laugh and keep going, or you
cry and give it up."
CHAPTER 22
There was no laughter three days later over the Sea of Laments. The weather had been chancy since Xantcha had put the Argi-vian coast at her back. From the start, thick clouds had blocked her view of the sun and stars. She navigated against a wind she knew wasn't steady and with an innate sense of direction that grew less reliable as she tired. They hadn't seen land for two days, not even a boat.
Xantcha would have brought the sphere down on a raft just then and taken her chances with strangers. A black wall-cloud had formed, leaking lightning, to the northeast. The waves below were stiff with cross winds and froth. She knew better than to try to soar above the impending storm, didn't have the strength to outrun it, and didn't know what would happen to the sphere if- when-downdrafts slammed it into the ocean.
Ratepe had his arms around her, keeping Xantcha warm and upright, the most he could do. He'd spotted the storm but hadn't said anything, other than that he knew how to swim. Ratepe was one up on Xantcha there; the long-ago seamen who'd taught her how to sail had warned her never to get friendly with the sea. If- when-they went down, she'd yawn out Urza's armor. Maybe it would keep her afloat, though it never had kept her dry.