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.
Gideon added, “But my teacher knew before I did.”
“How did he know?”
“Because of my power. As I dedicated myself to my training, my strength grew. To me, it just seemed to be the result of studying and learning. But later, after I knew the truth about myself, he said that he had known for some time, because he’d only ever seen one other hieromancer as powerful as I was.”
“Ah. The one who had given him the sural all those years ago.”
“Yes. A long time before it happened, he believed my Spark would be ignited and I would become… what I became.” Gideon said, “So he prepared me.”
“He told you what you were?” she asked.
“No. He told me about our kind, and about the one that he had known. He related what he knew about the Multiverse, the?ther, and the Blind Eternities. How to prepare for a walk. How to survive it.”
“So you knew what was happening?”
“Yes. I was fully conscious of what was happening.”
“Did you know before it happened?” she asked in astonishment.
“Not exactly. But when I felt my Spark ignite, I understood. It was…” He hesitated. “I killed someone,” he said quietly. “Someone very powerful. Very dangerous. I knew I shouldn’t have lived through that confrontation. Not logically. I was shocked at how much power I had accessed. I sensed a clarity in the world around me. I felt an intensity of experience, an awareness of simply being that I had never known. I had a moment, however fleeting, where I understood everything around me. I understood the Multiverse on a fundamental level, if you can imagine such a thing, so that when I slipped into the?ther I knew where to go.”
“Is it like that every time?”
“No,” he said. “As soon as I had landed on another plane, it was gone. I have tried to achieve that state of awareness for most of my life since then, but I have yet to come close.” He let out a slow breath. “But the planeswalk worked. Very much the way my teacher had described it. And also by following his teachings, I found my way back. So that I could tell him what I was.”
Chandra felt a mingled surge of wonder and envy. “I can’t imagine
…”
“Imagine what?” he asked.
“What my first walk would have been like, if I had known those things. If someone had told me.”
“You didn’t have any idea what was happening to you?”
“None,” she said. “I’d never even heard of a planeswalk.”
Chandra blinked as she realized they’d become indiscreet. She looked uneasily at the goblin walking ahead of them, its hands bound behind its back. But Jurl seemed to be paying no attention to them. Instead, he seemed jumpy, anxious, and wholly focused on their surroundings, as if expecting an ambush at any moment.
“That must have been hard,” Gideon said.
“I didn’t experience anything like you. I thought I was dying,” she admitted. “Or dead. Or… I don’t know. It was very painful. And, um, terrifying.”
She didn’t know why she was telling him this. She had never told anyone, not even Mother Luti. She’d never had a teacher except for Luti, and she had not known her long. Chandra had never even met another planeswalker before her most recent encounters. All that she knew about planeswalking, she’d taught herself, and all that she learned about her kind, which wasn’t a lot, she learned from Mother Luti.
“Some combination of desperation, survival instinct, and…” Chandra shrugged. “Sheer luck, I suppose, helped me find my way out of the?ther and onto a physical plane that first time.”
“And will,” he said.
“What?”
“Will,” Gideon said. “You have a very strong will. That makes a difference in who survives a walk like your first. And also like the one that brought you here.”
“How did you follow me?” She knew it couldn’t have been easy.
“Actually, you leave a pretty bright trail.”
She supposed that was why that mind mage with the cerulean cloak had been able to find her on Regatha.
“But the trail was erratic and seemed to…” He searched for the right word “… bounce all over the place. I could tell it had been a rough journey.” He added, “And to come here of all places…”
“I didn’t exactly choose it,” she said.
“I knew even as I approached that it was a bad destination.”
