WotC8732 Planeswalker (MtG novel. Artifact cycle book II)

476 Pages·2002·1.15 MB·English

by  Linn Abbey

Linn Abbey
CHAPTER 1
A man descended.
His journey had begun in the clouds, riding the
winds in search of a place remembered but no longer
known. He'd found the place, as he'd found it before, by
following the ancient glyphs an ancient folk had
carved into the land, glyphs that had endured
millennia of neglect and the cataclysmic finale of the
Brothers' War five years ago.
Much of Terisiare had vanished in the cataclysm,
reduced to dust by fratricidal hatred. That dust still
swirled overhead. Everyone coughed and harvests
were sparse, but the sunsets and sunrises were
magnificent luminous streaks of amber reaching
across the sky, seeking escape from a ruined world.
The brothers in whose names the war had been
fought had been reduced to curses: By Urza's whim
and Mishra's might, may you rot forever beneath the
forests of sunken Argoth.
Rumors said that Urza had caused the cataclysm
when he used Lat Nam sorcery to fuel his final, most
destructive, artifact. Others said that the cataclysm
was Mishra's curse as he died with Urza's hands
clasped around his throat. A few insisted that Urza
had survived his crimes. Within a year of the
cataclysm, all the rumors had merged in an
increasingly common curse: If I met Urza on the road,
I'd cripple him with my own two hands, as he and his
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brother crippled us, then I'd leave him for the rats and
vultures as he left Mishra.
Urza had survived. He'd heard the curse in its
infinite variations. After nearly five years in self-
chosen exile, the erstwhile Lord Protector of the Realm
had spent another year walking amongst the folk of
blasted Terisiare: the dregs of Yotia, the survivors of
Argive, the tattered, the famished, the lame, the
disheartened. No one had recognized him. Few had
known him, even in the glory days. Urza had never
been one to harangue his troops with rhetoric. He'd
been an inventor, a scholar, an artificer such as the
world had not seen since the Thran, and all he'd ever
wanted was to study in peace. He'd had that peace
once, near the beginning, and lost it, as he'd lost
everything, to the man—the abomination—his brother
had become.
A handful of Urza's students had survived the
cataclysm. They'd denounced their master, and Urza
hadn't troubled them with a visit. Urza's wife, Kayla
Bin-Kroog had survived, too. She now dwelt in austere
solitude with her grandson, writing an epic she called
The Antiquity Wars. Urza hadn't visited her either.
Kayla alone might have recognized him, and he had no
words for her. As for her grandson, Jarsyl, black-
haired and stocky, charming, amiable and quick-
witted . . . Urza had glimpsed the young man just once,
and that had been one time too many. His descent
continued.
Urza had not wanted to return to this place
where the war had, in a very real sense, begun nearly
fifty years earlier. He wasn't ashamed of what he'd
done to end the war. Filling the bowl-shaped sylex
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with his memories had been an act of desperation; the
sylex itself had been a sudden, suspect gift, and until
that day he'd neither studied nor practiced sorcery. He
hadn't known what using the sylex would do, but the
war had had to be stopped. The thing his brother had
become had to be stopped, else Terisiare's fate would
have been worse. Much worse.
No, Urza would not apologize, but he was not
pleased by his own survival.
Urza should have died when the sylex emptied.
He suspected that he had died, but the powerstones
over which he and his brother had contended had
preserved him. When Urza had awakened, the two
Thran jewels had become his eyes. All Thran devices
had been powered by such faceted stones, but his
Might-stone and Mishra's Weakstone had been as
different from ordinary powerstones as a candle to the
sun.
Once rejoined within Urza's skull, the Thran
jewels had restored him to his prime. He had no need
for food or rest, though he continued to sleep because a
man needed dreams even when he no longer needed
rest. And his new eyes gave him vision that reached
around dark corners into countless other worlds.
Urza believed that in time the battered realms of
Terisiare would recover, even thrive, but he had not
wished to watch that excruciatingly slow process, and
so he'd walked away. For five years after the sylex-
engendered cataclysm, Urza had explored the 'round-
the-corner worlds his faceted eyes revealed.
In one such world he'd met another traveler, a
woman named Meshuvel who'd confirmed what he'd
already guessed: He'd lost his mortality the day he
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destroyed Mishra. The blast had slain him, and the
Thran powerstones had brought him back to life
because he was—had always been—a planeswalker,
like Meshuvel herself.
Meshuvel explained to Urza that the worlds he'd
visited were merely a handful of the infinite planes of
the multiverse, any of which could be explored and
exploited by an immortal planeswalker. She taught
Urza to change his shape at will and to comprehend
thought without the inconvenience of language or
translation. But even among planeswalkers Urza was
unique. For all her knowledge, Meshuvel couldn't see
the multiverse as Urza saw it. Her eyes were an
ordinary brown, and she'd never heard of the Thran.
Meshuvel could tell Urza nothing about his eyes,
except that she feared them; and feared them so much
that she tried to snare him in a time pit. When that
failed, she fled the plane where they'd been living.
Urza had thought about pursuing Meshuvel,
more from curiosity than vengeance, but the plane
she'd called Dominaria—the plane where he'd been
born, the plane he'd nearly destroyed— kept its claws
in his mind. Five years after the cataclysm, Dominaria
had pulled him home.
Urza's descent ended on a wind-eroded plateau.
Clouds thickened, turned gray. Cold wind, sharp with
ice and dust, plastered long strands of ash-blond hair
across Urza's eyes. Winter had come earlier than Urza
had expected, another unwelcome gift from the sylex.
A few more days and the glyphs would have been
buried until spring.
Four millennia ago, the Thran had transformed
the plateau into a fortress, an isolated stronghold
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wherein they'd made their final stand. Presumably, it
once had a name; perhaps the glyphs proclaimed it
still, but no one had cracked that enigmatic code, and
no one cracked it that afternoon. Urza's jeweled eyes
gave him no insight into their makers' language. Fifty
years ago, in his natural youth, Urza and his brother
had named the great cavern within the plateau Koilos,
and Koilos it remained.
Koilos had been ruins then. Now the ruins were
themselves ruined, but not merely by the sylex. The
brothers and their war had wrought this damage,
plundering the hollow plateau for Thran secrets,
Thran powerstones.
In truth, Urza had expected worse. Mishra had
held this part of Terisiare for most of the war, and it it
pleased Urza to believe that his brother's allies had
been more destructive than his own allies had been. In
a dusty corner of his heart, Urza knew that had he
been able to ravage Koilos, even the shadows would
have been stripped from the stones, but Mishra's
minions had piled their rubble neatly, almost
reverently. Their shredded tents still flapped in the
rising wind. Looking closer, Urza realized they'd left
suddenly and without their belongings, summoned,
perhaps, to Argoth, as Urza had summoned his
followers for that final battle five years earlier.
Urza paused on the carefully excavated path. He
closed his eyes and shuddered as memories flooded his
mind.
He and Mishra had fought from the beginning in
a sunlit Argive nursery. How could they not, when he
was the eldest by less than a year and Mishra was the
brother everyone liked better?
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Yet they'd been inseparable, so keenly aware of
their differences that they'd come to rely on the other's
strengths. Urza never learned the arts of friendship or
affection because he'd had Mishra between him and
the rest of the world.
And Mishra? What had he given Mishra? What
had Mishra ever truly needed from him?
"How long?" Urza asked the wind in a whisper
that was both rage and pain. "When did you first turn
away from me?"
Urza reopened his eyes and resumed his trek. He
left no footprints in the dust and snow. Nothing
distracted him. The desiccated corpse propped against
one tent pole wasn't worth a second glance, despite the
metal plates rusting on its brow or the brass pincers
replacing its left arm. Urza had seen what his brother
had become; it wasn't surprising to him that Mishra's
disciples were similarly grotesque.
His faceted eyes peered into darkness, seeing
nothing.
Now, that was a surprise, and a disappointment.
Urza had expected insight the way a child expects a
present on New Year's morning. Disappoint Mishra
and you'd have gotten a summer tantrum: loud, violent
and quickly passed. Disappoint Urza and Urza got cold
and quiet, like ice, until he'd thawed through the
problem.
After four thousand years had they plundered the
last Thran powerstone? Exposed the last artifact? Was
there nothing left for his eyes to see?
A dull blue glint caught Urza's attention. He
wrenched a palm-sized chunk of metal free from the
rocks and rubble. Immediately it moved in his hand,
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curving back on itself. It was Thran, of course. An
artificer of Urza's skill didn't need jeweled eyes to
recognize that ancient craftsmanship. Only the Thran
had known how to forge a sort of sentience between
motes of metal.
But Urza saw the blue-gray metal more clearly
than ever before. With time, the right tools, the right
reagents, and a bit of luck, he might be able to
decipher its secrets. Then, acting without deliberate
thought, as he very rarely did, Urza drove his right
thumbnail into the harder-than-steel surface. He
thought of a groove, a very specific groove that
matched his nail. When he lifted his thumb, the groove
was in the metal and remained as he slowly counted to
ten.
"I see it. Yes, I see it. So simple, once it can be
seen."
Urza thought of Mishra, spoke to Mishra. No one
else, not even his master-student, Tawnos, could have
grasped the shifting symmetries his thoughts had
imposed on the ancient metal.
"As if it had been your thumb," Urza conceded to
the wind. Impulse, like friendship, had been Mishra's
gift.
Urza could almost see him standing there, brash
and brilliant and not a day over eighteen. An ice
crystal died in Urza's lashes. He blinked and saw
Mishra's face, slashed and tattered, hanging by flesh
threads in the cogs of a glistening engine.
"Phyrexia!" he swore and hurled the shard into
the storm.
It bounced twice, ringing like a bell, then
vanished.
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"Phyrexia!"
He'd learned that word five years ago, the very
day of the cataclysm, when Tawnos had brought him
the sylex. Tawnos had gotten the bowl from Ashnod
and, for that reason alone, Urza would have cast it
aside. But he'd fought Mishra once already that fateful
day. For the first time, Urza had poured himself into
his stone, the Mightstone, and if his brother had been
a man, his brother would have died. But Mishra had
no longer been a man; he hadn't died, and Urza needed
whatever help fate offered.
In those chaotic moments, as their massed war
engines turned on one another, there'd been no time to
ask questions or consider implications. Urza believed
Mishra had transformed himself into a living artifact,
and that abominable act had justified the sylex. It was
after, when there was no one left to ask, that the
questions had surfaced.
Tawnos had mentioned a demon—a creature from
Phyrexia— that had ambushed him and Ashnod.
Never mind the circumstances that had brought Urza's
only friend and his brother's treacherous lieutenant
together on the Argoth battlefield. Tawnos and Ashnod
had been lovers once, and love, other than an abstract
devotion to inquiry or knowledge, meant very little to
Urza. Ask instead, what was a Phyrexian doing in
Argoth? Why had it usurped all the artifacts, his and
Mishra's? Then, ask a final question, what had he or
Mishra to do with Phyrexia that its demon had become
their common enemy?
Some exotic force—some Phyrexian force—had
conspired against them. Wandering, utterly alone
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across the ruins of Terisiare, there had seemed no
other explanation.
In the end, in the forests of Argoth, only the sylex
had prevented a Phyrexian victory.
Within a year of the cataclysm, Urza had tracked
the sylex back through Ashnod's hands to a woman
named Loran, whom he'd met in his youth. Though
Loran had studied the Thran with him and Mishra
under the tutelage of the archeologist Tocasia, she'd
turned away from artifice and become a scholar in the
ivory towers of Teresia City, a witness of the land-
based power the sylex had unleashed.
The residents of Terisia City had sacrificed half
their number to keep the bowl out of his or Mishra's
hands. Half hadn't been enough. Loran had lost the
sylex and the use of her right arm to Ashnod's
infamous inquiries, but the rest of her had survived.
Urza had approached Loran warily, disguised as a
woman who'd lost her husband and both her sons in
what he bitterly described as "the brothers' cursed
folly."
Loran was a competent sage and a better person
than Urza hoped to be, but she was no match for his
jeweled eyes. As she'd heated water on a charcoal
brazier, he'd stolen her memories.
The sylex, of course, was gone, consumed by the
forces it had released, and Loran's memory of it was
imperfect. That was Ashnod's handiwork. The torturer
had taken no chances with her many victims. Loran
recalled a copper bowl incised with Thran glyphs Urza
had forgotten until he saw them again in Loran's
memory. Some of the glyphs were sharp enough that
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