“Yes, your sural.”
“My teacher gave it to me.”
“Did he…” She hesitated, then asked, “Did he know about you?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Yes.”
“Was he a…” Chandra glanced at the goblin trudging ahead of them. “Was your teacher one of us?”
“No, but he knew about our kind.”
“How?”
“His teacher was one.” Gideon added, “And his teacher gave him the sural.”
“Where did it originally come from?” She had never seen anything like it.
“I don’t know.” Beside her in the dark, Gideon said quietly, “His teacher died without telling him where he’d gotten it.”
“Do you know how he died?” For a planeswalker, there were so many possibilities.
“A pyromancer killed him.” His voice was calm, without expression.
There was a long silence between them.
The ground they were walking over was particularly damp. It squished under Chandra’s feet as she kept pace beside Gideon in the dark, neither of them speaking.
Ahead of them, Jurl trudged along, his shoulders stooped. He started to pant a little, and his steps got slower. Apparently the goblin was feeling fatigued. At one point, he asked to rest. Gideon refused the request.
The continuing cool silence between her and Gideon gradually got on Chandra’s nerves. After all, it wasn’t her fault that his teacher’s teacher had been killed by a fire mage. For all she knew, he deserved what happened to him.
“So did you know him?” she asked abruptly.
“Know who?” He sounded mildly puzzled, as if he’d been thinking about something else entirely.
“The pla-” But before she could finish the word, she recalled that Jurl could hear them. The goblin was stupid and ignorant, but nonetheless capable of plotting and scheming. The less he learned by eavesdropping, the better. “The one who owned the sural. The one who died.”
“No. He died many years before I met my teacher.”
“How did you meet your teacher?” she asked.
Chandra had encountered very few planeswalkers. In her experience, they were a rare breed, and they were loners. They didn’t congregate, and they weren’t necessarily friendly to each other.
“He… found me,” Gideon said.
“After you…” She phrased it in a way that would make no sense to the goblin, in case the creature was feigning fatigue and listening to them. “Crossed over?”
“You mean after I traveled?” Gideon sounded a little amused by her attempt to question him without being understood by their captive.
“Yes.”
“No, we met before that.”
“How did he find you?”
“Jurl, you said it wasn’t far,” Gideon reminded the goblin. “This seems far.”
“Yes,” Jurl agreed wearily. “Seems far.”
“If you’ve lied…”
“No.” Jurl added, “Don’t take hands.”
“Well, maybe I’m just little tired,” Gideon admitted to Chandra. “Does it seem far to you?”
She couldn’t see his expression. Instead of answering him, she prodded, “You were about to tell me how you met your teacher.”
“Was I?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m bored.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “Of course, we could talk about something else. The scroll, for example.”
“Then I’d be bored.”
“So how did your teacher find you?”
“Well, you’ll identify with this,” he said. “I was a criminal.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” She asked, “What did you do? Attack women and take away their valuables?”
“Very funny. As a matter of fact, we sacrificed the cutest animals we could find and drank their blood from our victims’ skulls by the light of the moon.”
“Then this place should bring you back to your roots.”
“To be serious, we mostly broke into rich people’s homes-”
“We?”
“There was a group of us. I was the leader, more or less. We stole money, goods, valuables. And, uh…”
He seemed reluctant to continue his story. “Yes?” she prodded.
“Then we gave it away.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “To the poor.”
She frowned. “Why?”
“We were…” He seemed to search for the right word. “Idealistic.”
“That’s a far cry from drinking animal blood.”
“I was very young. I wanted to change things,” he said. “But I didn’t know how. I was good at stealing. Good at fighting. Pretty good at handling a group of wild boys my own age.”
“That’s easy to believe.”
“But I had a lot to learn.”
“Where were your parents? Didn’t they try to rein you in?” Her own parents had certainly tried, back when she was a girl.
“My mother was dead by then,” he said.
“And your father?”
“Who knows?” He sounded indifferent. “I never met him.”
They all walked in silence for a while. Chandra really started to feel, deep in her bones, how helpless she was here without her power. Even if they did get some answers from this wise woman Jurl was taking them to, what would they do to get away from this plane? She tried to stop thinking it.
Finally she broke the silence: she had to find something to distract her from these thoughts.
“Your teacher,” she said suddenly.
“What?” She could tell by Gideon’s reaction that he had been far away. Perhaps lost in thoughts similar to her own.
“How did your teacher find you?” she said urgently. “How did he get you to give up your life as an outlaw?”
There was a pause. Then he said, “What makes you think I gave it up?”
She released her breath on a puff of surprise. Then she smiled-and felt grateful to him for making her smile. “I stand corrected.”
In fact, for all she knew, he was an outlaw. She had assumed he followed her here to capture her and take her back to Kephalai. She had vaguely supposed he was some sort of inter-planar bounty hunter. The Prelate had employed someone with extraordinary abilities to go after Chandra last time. Why not this time?
But since the Prelate’s forces didn’t know where the scroll was, this planeswalker obviously hadn’t returned it to them.
Perhaps Gideon was still an outlaw. Or at least playing all the angles and working on both sides of the fence. The thought warmed him to her.
“As long as you stick to our bargain and don’t try to deliver me to the Prelate,” she said aloud, “I make no judgments about the path you have chosen in life.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“So were did your teacher find you?”
“I was in prison,” he said.
“We do have a lot in common.”
“He was respected, and the prison wasn’t well equipped to hold someone with my abilities,” Gideon said. “So I was released into his custody.”
“And that’s how your education began?”
“Yes,” Gideon said. “More easily than he expected, I suppose. After my initial resistance-and an attempt to escape his custody-I became a dedicated student. Eager.”
“You liked the power,” she said, remembering her own obsession with it when she had started discovering some of the things she could do, things that no one in her community had understood or condoned.
“Yes, I liked the power. I liked developing and honing it. Mostly, though…” Gideon paused pensively. “Mostly, I realized that my teacher was the first person I’d ever met who could help me find what I was looking for.”
“Which was?”
“Direction. Focus. A path for my life.”
“Direction…” Chandra hadn’t thought about direction before. She had gone to the Keralian Monastery to learn more about her power. How to access more of it, but also how to control it better. And her recent experiences demonstrated that she still had much to learn in that respect.
She didn’t want to think about any of that now. Besides, she didn’t even have access to her full power at the moment. And that wasn’t a subject she wanted to dwell on, either, just now. So she asked Gideon, “When did you find out what you really were?”
“When the time came,” he said. “When my Spark was ignited.”
The Spark, Chandra had been taught, was a suffusion of the Blind Eternities within a planeswalker’s soul. It was what gave an individual protection against the entropic forces of the?ther. Although it happened differently for everyone, the ignition of a planeswalker’s Spark was the trigger for their first walk.