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first war."
    "You haven't interfered?"
    His voice harshened and his eyes flashed. With Urza,
madness was never more than a moment away.
    "You said I mustn't, and I obey. You should look for
yourself. Now is the time-"
    "Perhaps. I dare not move too soon. The land remembers;
there can be no mistakes. I must have cause. I must be very
careful, Xantcha. If I reveal myself too soon, I foresee
disaster. We must weigh our choices carefully."
    Retorts swirled in Xantcha's mind. It was never truly
we with Urza, but she'd made her choices long ago. "No one
will suspect, even if you used your true name and shape.
There've been a score of doom-saying Urzas on the road this
year alone. You've become the stuff of legends. No one
would believe you're you."
    A rare smile lit up her companion's face. "That bad
still?"
    "Worse. But please, go to Baszerat and Morvern. A
quarrel has become a war. So it began with the Fallaji and
the Yotians. Who knows, there might be brothers.... You've
been up here too long, Urza."
    Urza reached into her mind again, gathering landmarks
and languages, which she willingly surrendered. Then, in a
blink's time, she was back into her own proper
consciousness. Urza faded into the between-worlds, which
was, among other things, the fastest way to travel across
the surface of a single world.
    "Good luck," she wished him, then knelt down.
    Crashing crockery had crushed a good many of Urza's
gnats. Quicksilver had dissolved uncounted others. Yet many
swirled around in confusion on the floor. Xantcha labored
until midnight, gathering them into a box no deeper than
her finger, but far too steep for any of them to climb.
When the dirt was motionless, she took the box into the
alcove where Urza stored his raw materials.
    The shelves were neat. Every casket and flask was
clearly labeled, albeit in a language Xantcha couldn't
read. She didn't need to read labels. The flask she wanted
had a unique lambent glow. It was pure phloton, distilled
from fire, starlight and mana, a recipe Urza had found on
the world were he'd found Xantcha. "Waste not, want not,"
she whispered over the seething box. The gnats blazed like
fireflies as they fell through the phloton, and then were
gone.
    Xantcha resealed the flask and replaced it on the
shelf, exactly as she'd found it, before returning to her
own room. She had a plan of her own, which she'd promised
herself she'd implement when the time was right. That time
had come when Urza touched her hair.
    If Urza couldn't see the present Phyrexian threat
because he was obsessed with the past... If he couldn't
care about the folk of Baszerat or Morvem because he still
cared too much about what had happened to Mishra, then
Xantcha figured she had to bring the past and Mishra to
Urza. She had it all worked out in her mind, as much as she
    ever worked anything out: find a young man who resembled
Kayla's word picture, teach him the answers to Urza's
guilty questions, then troll her trumped-up Mishra past
Urza's eyes.
    A new Mishra wouldn't cure his madness. Nothing could
do that, not while those powerstone eyes were lodged in
Urza's skull, but if a false Mishra could convince Urza to
walk away from his worktable, that would be enough.

CHAPTER 3
    Morning came to the Ohran Ridge, and found Xantcha
sitting in the bottom of a transparent sphere as it drifted
above springtime mountain meadows. The sphere was as big
around as Xantcha was tall and had been a gift from Urza.
Or more accurately, the artifact that produced it had been
Urza's gift. He'd devised the cyst to preserve her as she
followed him from world to world. A deliberate yawn and a
mnemonic rhyme drew a protective oil out of the cyst.
Depending on the rhyme, the oil expanded into the buoyant
sphere or ripened into a tough, flexible armor.
    Urza had taught Xantcha the rhyme for the armor. The
sphere was the result of Xantcha's curiosity and
improvisations. Urza complained that she'd