“Get up,” Gideon said.
“Cannot,” Jurl said.
Chandra moved to put her hands under the prostrate goblin’s shoulders, and pushed him-with some effort-up to a kneeling position. From there, she and Gideon each took one arm and hauled Jurl to his feet.
“Now take us to the wise woman,” Gideon said.
“Yes.”
“Oh, one more thing.” Gideon twitched the handle of the sural. Jurl protested as the sharp bands of steel tightened around his wrists and pulled his arms backward at a painful angle. “If you try to trick us, or betray us, or take us to anyone else…” Gideon tugged the handle again. “I’ll pull on this thing so hard, it will cut off your hands.”
“No!”
“Without hands, the rest of your life will be helpless and miserable. On the bright side,” Gideon added, “it will no doubt also be very, very short.”
“No trick!” Jurl promised. “Just wise woman!”
“Good,” said Gideon.
“This way,” Jurl said.
They left the stone ruins behind and set off in a different direction than Chandra had gone before. As they walked through the quiet, dying landscape, following their reluctant guide, Gideon said, “You’re pretty useful when there’s trouble, even without the fire magic.”
So was he. But she was reluctant to pay him compliments. Instead she asked, “Where did you get your…” She pointed to the weapon whose handle he held.
“The sural?”
“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
