"02.Planeswalker" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

shifting symmetries his thoughts had imposed on the ancient
metal.
"As if it had been your thumb," Urza conceded to the
wind. Impulse, like friendship, had been Mishra's gift.
Urza could almost see him standing there, brash and
brilliant and not a day over eighteen. An ice crystal died
in Urza's lashes. He blinked and saw Mishra's face, slashed
and tattered, hanging by flesh threads in the cogs of a
glistening engine.
"Phyrexia!" he swore and hurled the shard into the
storm.
It bounced twice, ringing like a bell, then vanished.
"Phyrexia!"
He'd learned that word five years ago, the very day of
the cataclysm, when Tawnos had brought him the sylex.
Tawnos had gotten the bowl from Ashnod and, for that reason
alone, Urza would have cast it aside. But he'd fought
Mishra once already that fateful day. For the first time,
Urza had poured himself into his stone, the Mightstone, and
if his brother had been a man, his brother would have died.
But Mishra had no longer been a man; he hadn't died, and
Urza needed whatever help fate offered.
In those chaotic moments, as their massed war engines
turned on one another, there'd been no time to ask
questions or consider implications. Urza believed Mishra
had transformed himself into a living artifact, and that
abominable act had justified the sylex. It was after, when
there was no one left to ask, that the questions had
surfaced.
Tawnos had mentioned a demon-a creature from Phyrexia-
that had ambushed him and Ashnod. Never mind the
circumstances that had brought Urza's only friend and his
brother's treacherous lieutenant together on the Argoth
battlefield. Tawnos and Ashnod had been lovers once, and
love, other than an abstract devotion to inquiry or
knowledge, meant very little to Urza. Ask instead, what was
a Phyrexian doing in Argoth? Why had it usurped all the
artifacts, his and Mishra's? Then, ask a final question,
what had he or Mishra to do with Phyrexia that its demon
had become their common enemy?
Some exotic force-some Phyrexian force-had conspired
against them. Wandering, utterly alone across the ruins of
Terisiare, there had seemed no other explanation.
In the end, in the forests of Argoth, only the sylex
had prevented a Phyrexian victory.
Within a year of the cataclysm, Urza had tracked the
sylex back through Ashnod's hands to a woman named Loran,
whom he'd met in his youth. Though Loran had studied the
Thran with him and Mishra under the tutelage of the
archeologist Tocasia, she'd turned away from artifice and