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resolve. Nothing on the
table was alive. Urza was adamant that his artifacts
remained within what he called "the supreme principle of
the Thran." Artifacts were engines in service to life,
never life itself, and never, ever, sentient.
    Bright tents pimpled Urza's table landscape. There were
even miniature reproductions of the artifacts he and his
brother had brought to the place and time that Kayla had
    called "The Dawn of Fire."
    Xantcha focused her attention on the automata. She
found Mishra's shiny dragon engine, a ground-bound
bumblebee among the gnats and Urza's delicate ornithopters.
When Xantcha saw an ornithopter spread its wings and rise
above the table, she was confident that she'd seen the
reason for Urza's summons. Miniaturizing those early
artifacts had been a greater challenge than creating the
swarms of tiny men and women who milled around them.
    "You've got them flying!"
    Urza pushed her aside. His eyes required no polished
glass assistance; he could most likely see the horseflies,
the fleas, and the worms as well. Xantcha noticed that he
was frowning.
    "It's very good," she assured him, fearing that her
initial response hadn't been sincere enough.
    "No, no! You were looking in the wrong place, Xantcha.
Look here-" He positioned her hands above the largest tent.
"What do you see now?"
    "Blue cloth," she replied, knowing full well that
within the tent, automata representing Urza and the major
characters of Kayla's epic were midway through a scene
she'd observed many times before. At first she'd been
curious to see how Urza's script might differ from his
wife's, but not any more.
    Urza muttered something-it was probably just as well
that Xantcha didn't quite catch it-and the blue cloth
became a shadow through which the automata could be clearly
seen. There was Urza, accurate down to the same blue shirt
and threadbare trousers. His master-student, Tawnos, stood
nearby, a half head taller than the rest. The Kroog
warlord, the Fallaji qadir and a score of others, all
moving as if they were alive and oblivious to the huge face
hovering overhead. Mishra was in the shadowed tent too, but
Urza was peculiar about his younger brother's gnat. While
all the others had mortal features, Mishra was never more
than wisps of metal at the qadir's side.
    "Is it the second morning?" Xantcha asked. Urza was
breathing down her neck, expecting conversation. She hoped
he didn't intend to show her the assassinations. Suffering,
even of automata, repelled her.
    Another grumble from Urza, then, "Look for Ashnod!"
    According to The Antiquity Wars, auburn-haired Ashnod
wasn't at "The Dawn of Fire," but Urza always made a gnat
in her image. He'd put it on the table, where it did
nothing except get in the way of the others. To appease her
hovering companion, Xantcha moved the glass slightly and
found a red-capped dot in the shadow of another tent.
    "You moved her there?"
    "Never!" Urza roared. His eyes flashed, and the air
within the cottage was very still. "I refine my
understanding, I do not ever control them. Each time, I
create new opportunities for the truth to emerge. Time,
Xantcha, time is always the key. I call them motes of time-
the tiny motes of time that replay the past, long after
events have passed beyond memory. The more I refine my
automata, the more of those motes I can attract. Truth
attracts truth as time attracts time Xantcha, and the more
motes of time I can attract, the more truth I learn about
that day. And finally- finally-the truth clings to Ashnod,
    and she has been drawn out of her lies and deception. Watch
as she reveals what I have always suspected!"
    Urza snapped his fingers, and, equally fascinated and
repelled, Xantcha watched Ashnod's gnat skulk from shadow
to shadow until it was outside the parley tent, very near
Mishra's back. Then the Ashnod-gnat knelt and manipulated
something-the glass wasn't strong enough to unmask the
object-and a tiny spark