"This should be an especial relief to you, Xantcha, since I will keep your heart in such a place where it cannot be lost or disturbed. It is also useful for me, since when I know where you are, I also know where your heart is, and contrariwise as well. And Serra has returned that crystal pendant I gave you while I was fleeing Phyrexia." He fished it out of one of the many boxes and draped it around Xantcha's neck. "You, I, and your heart and my pendant together make a single unit, a triangle, the strongest of angled structures. None of us can get lost."

Triangles ... triangles with four points? It had to be mathematics.... Of all the lessons Xantcha had been taught in the Fane of Flesh, mathematics had come hardest. She'd long since learned that she didn't need to understand the why of mathematics if she simply followed all the rules. If the rules turned her heart into one of a triangle's four parts, she'd keep quiet about it. And she'd survive with her heart in a niche on an airless moon the same way she'd survived the centuries when it had lain in the Phyrexian vault.

"What do you need of me?" she asked, hoping to forestall any further discussion of unimaginable triangles.

"You are good at sniffing out Phyrexians. When we reach a plane, I want you to explore it, as you would anyway, looking for infestations."

"I'll need to use the sphere, is that all right?" The modifications remained a sore point between them. "You'll fix it so it isn't black anymore?"

Urza ignored her questions. "For me, being somewhere quickly is easier than getting there slowly. I will search for the victors, the folk who drove the Phyrexians out and forced them to create Phyrexia."

You will do what you want, Xantcha thought in the most private corner of her mind. Of course, so would she. Life was never better than when she was soaring the windstreams, chasing her curiosity, trading trinkets with strangers, and

collecting the stories that born-folk told.

"What do I do if I find a Phyrexian infestation?" She liked the word, her mind filled with possible ways to drive out an infestation.

"You run away. The moment you are aware of Phyrexians, you hide yourself in the meeting place I'll point out to you, and you wait for me. I'll take no more chances with you and Phyrexians. You are vulnerable to them, Xantcha. It's no fault of yours-you're brave and good-spirited-but they tainted you. You are a bell goat and after you followed me to Phyrexia, my enemies were able to use you to find me-much as I will use your heart to find you."

I never told you the Ineffable's name. That's how they found you. Xantcha thought, but said nothing. She'd made her choice to stay with Urza, even knowing his obsessions and madness. If he reordered his memories of the past to absolve himself of blame or responsibility, well-he'd done it before and he'd do it again. Xantcha believed in vengeance against Phyrexia and believed that Urza, with all his flaws, stood a better chance of achieving it than she.

So they began their quest for the victors, the folk who'd driven the Phyrexians out of the natural multiverse. Urza set his mark on each world they visited, regardless of its hospitality. That way, he said, they would know when they'd come full circle. Xantcha wasn't certain about the full circle notion; it raised some of the same problems as a four-pointed triangle, but the marks kept them from accidentally exploring the same world twice.

It was no surprise to Xantcha that they found very few hospitable worlds where the Phyrexians had not made an appearance. She'd been a dodger. She knew about the relentless explorations carried out by the searcher- priests. The first few decades after leaving Serra's realm, she'd spent most of her time huddled up at whatever meeting place Urza designated, then gradually Urza had relaxed his rules. She could wander freely, provided she encountered no active Phyrexians.

Thus began a long, golden period of wandering the multiverse. Every handful of worlds held one that was hospitable enough for Xantcha to exchange Urza's armor for the sphere. Every ten or twelve handfuls of hospitable worlds revealed one that was interesting, at least to Xantcha. She became the tourist who delighted in minor variations, while Urza was on a single-minded quest.

"They were here," he said when they rejoined each other. They met in a white stone grotto of a world where elves were the dominant species and civilization was measured by forests, not cities.

"I know," Xantcha agreed, having found the spoor of two searcher expeditions and heard tales of demons with glistening, metallic skin in several languages. "Searchers came through a good long time ago. They're remembered as demons and the bringers of chaos. They came through again, maybe a thousand local years ago, but only in a few places. They collected beasts both times, I think. There's metal here, but no mines. The searchers will come back again. They're waiting for the elves to do the hard work of opening the ground."

Urza nodded though he wasn't happy. "How did you learn such things? There are no centers of learning here, few

records in the ground or above it. I have found it most frustrating!"

"I talk to everyone, Urza. I trade with them," she explained, handing Urza a sack filled with trinkets and treasures, her profits from three seasons' wandering. He'd take them to the bolt-hole where he kept her heart. "Everyone has a story,"

"A story, Xantcha-what I want is the truth! The hard- edged truth."

She squared her shoulders. "The truth is, this is not the victor's world. I could have told you that before the sun set twice."

"And how could you have done that?"

"No one here knows a word for war."

Urza stiffened. A planeswalker didn't have to listen with his ears. He could skim thought and meaning directly off the surface of another mind and drink down a new language like water. As a result, Urza seldom paid attention to the actual words he heard or spoke. He handled surprise poorly, embarrassment, worse. His breathing stopped, and his eyes shed their mortal illusion.

"I have encountered a new world," he snapped after a pensive moment. Equilor. His lips hadn't moved.

Xantcha didn't disbelieve him, although Equilor wasn't a word that she remembered hearing on this or any other world. "Is it a name?" she asked cautiously.

"An old name. The oldest name. The farthest plane. It belongs to a plane on the edge of time."

"Another created world, like Phyrexia or Serra's realm?"

"No, I think not. I hope not."

She'd wager, if she'd ever been the wagering sort, that Urza hadn't learned of Equilor from the elves of the forest world but had heard of it years ago and forgotten it until just now when she'd challenged him.

They set out at once, with no more preparation than Urza made for any between-worlds journey. He explained that preparation and, especially, directions weren't important. 'Walking the between-worlds wasn't like walking down a path. There was no north or south, left or right, only the background glow of all the planes that were and, rising out of the glow, a sense of those planes that a 'walker could reach in a single stride. By choosing the faintest of the rising planes at each step, Urza insisted they would in time arrive at Equilor, the plane on the edge of time.

Xantcha couldn't imagine a place where direction didn't matter, but then, for her the between-worlds remained as hostile as it had been the first time Urza dragged her through it. For her the between-worlds was a changeless place of paradox and sheer terror.

At first, the only evidence she had that Urza was doing anything different was indirect. Her armor crumbled, the instant Urza released her, in the air of the next, new world. There was breathable air in each new world they 'walked to, as if he'd at last given up the notion that the Phyrexians could have begun on a world without air. And Urza himself was exhausted when they arrived. He would go into the ground and sleep as much as a local year while she explored.