Planeswalker

CHAPTER 17

Xantcha awoke with her butt on the ground and her back against an apple tree's broken trunk. Torn branches with upside-down leaves blocked her view of the world. There were green apples piled in her lap and the crook of her throbbing arm. The portal explosion had thrown her so hard she'd shattered a tree when she fell, but Urza's armor had kept her whole.

Ratepe stood among the branches, looking anxious, but not at her.

"How long was I out?" she asked, reaching for the waterskin he dangled with her good arm.

"A bit..."

He dropped the waterskin in her lap. Whatever had his attention wasn't letting it go. She pulled the cork with her teeth and took a swallow before asking:

"What's out there?"

"He came out of nowhere, as soon as you'd fallen. His eyes blazed lightning and fire."

Xantcha imagined the worst. "Another Phyrexian?"

She tried to stand but armor or no armor, Phyrexian or no Phyrexian, she'd taken a beating, and her body wasn't ready for anything. Latching onto the hem of Ratepe's tunic, Xantcha dragged herself upright.

The awe-inspiring invader had been Urza, not another Phyrex-ian. Garbed in stiff armor and looking like a painted statue, he contemplated the metal-and-oil wreckage. He carried an ornate staff, the source of the lightning web that ebbed and flowed around him. Xantcha thought Urza had lost that staff ages ago when they were dodging Phyrexian ambushes. She wasn't entirely pleased to see it again.

Her battered arm wanted out of the armor. Xantcha would have preferred to wait until she had a better sense of Urza's mood, but there wasn't time for that. She silently recited the mnemonic that dissolved the armor. Her arm swelled immediately.

"Has he said anything?" she asked.

"Not a word. The way he looked, I got out of his way. Might've been better if there had been another Phyrexian for him to fry?"

"Might've," Xantcha agreed.

If there'd been an upright Phyrexian in the vicinity, Urza would have had another target besides her. She couldn't remember the last time he'd come charging to her rescue. In point of fact, she didn't think he had come to

her rescue. Since they'd gotten to Dominaria, Xantcha's heart had sat gathering dust on a shelf in Urza's alcove. She didn't think Urza had given it a second thought in over a century, but she wasn't surprised that he'd been watching it closely while she and Ratepe were away. She imagined it had flashed when she hit the tree.

Best get it over with, she decided and said to Ratepe, "You wait here," though there was no chance that he'd pay attention, and she was grateful for the help clambering through the tangled branches.

"Been a long time since I've seen a compleat one," she said casually, starting the conversation in the middle, which was sometimes the best way when Urza was rigid and wrapped in power.

"You should have known better than to engage a Phyrexian with my brother beside you!"

Urza was angry. His eyes were fire, his breath sulfur smoke and sparks. Xantcha winced when they landed on her face. He either hadn't noticed-or didn't care-that she wasn't encased in his armor. She was groping for the words that would calm him when Ratepe spoke up.

"This was my idea. We wouldn't have gotten into trouble if I hadn't badgered her into tracking the riders away from Tabarna's palace."

Urza turned without moving. "Palace?" He'd followed her heart between-worlds and didn't know where, precisely, they were.

"Pincar City's a short, hard ride for six men on good horses," Xantcha said and pointed northwest. "We spotted the riders going out a sea gate at sunrise. It was my decision to get involved when I saw them laying down an ambulator's nether end."

"An ambulator, here?"

Urza turned his head, looking for one. He was in the here and now again. Xantcha relaxed.

"We blew it up in the firepots. They had the nether end here. I sure didn't want to go through to get the prime, and I didn't want to risk carrying a loose nether around with me, especially not after what came out. I swear I was expecting sleepers and, at the outside, a tender-priest. Nothing like this."

Urza rolled the wreckage with his staff. Bright, compound eyes lopked up at the sun, metal parts clattered, and Ratepe leapt a foot in the air, thinking it was still alive.

"They've sent a demon," Urza mused, slipping out of Efuand, into his oldest language, pure ancient Argivian.

"Not a demon," Xantcha corrected, sticking with Efuand. "Some new kind of priest. Not as bad as a demon, but pretty bad when you were expecting a cadre of sleepers."

"How do you know what it was if you've never seen it before?" Ratepe asked. A reasonable question, though Xantcha wished he hadn't been staring at Urza's eyes as he asked it.

"Yes," Urza added, back to Efuand. "How can you be sure?" He tipped his staff toward one of the two Efuand corpses lying near the Phyrexian. "Are they sleepers? They have the smell of Phyrexia around them."

Xantcha swallowed her shock. Urza had long admitted that she was better at scenting out Phyrexians, but he'd

never hinted how much better, and she'd never tried to put the distinctions into words, any words from any language, including Phyrexian. "This is a priest-" she nudged the wreckage with her foot-"because it looks like a priest."

"That's not an answer," Ratepe chided.

"I'm not finished!"

Xantcha got on her knees and with her good hand attempted to loosen the Phyrexian's triangular face-plate. It was a struggle. The tenders had compleated it carefully, and it had recently received a generous allocation of glistening oil to bind what remained of its flesh to its metal carapace. Once she'd got her fingertips under one sharp corner, Ratepe helped her pry it off.

Shredded leather clung to the interior of the plate, matching the shreds of a skinless but still recognizably childish face that it had covered.

"It had compleated eyes," Xantcha explained, indicating the coiled wires emerging from the empty sockets. "Only the higher priests and warriors have compleat eyes. And it had an articulated mouth; that's definitely priest-compleat. Diggers and such, they just have boxes in their chests. And all the metal's the same, not scraps. That's priest- compleat, too. It's got no guts, just an oil bladder. A priest's got muscles and nerves, compleated, of course, joined with gears and wire, but it's got the brain it was decanted with. The brain makes it go. That's why most Phyrexians have two arms, two legs, its brain knows two arms, two legs-"

"You said they weren't flesh," Ratepe interrupted, a bit breathless and green-cheeked. He'd told her once that he hadn't been able to help with the butchering on his family's farm. Probably he wished he hadn't helped her now.

"This isn't flesh." She tore off a shredded bit. Not surprisingly, he wouldn't take it from her hand, but Urza did. "This is what flesh becomes when it is compleated."

"They start with a living man and transform him into this," Urza's voice was flat and cold as he ground the shred between his fingers.

"They start with a newt," Xantcha said flatly.

"So, this is what would have happened to ..." Ratepe couldn't finish his thought aloud.

"If I'd been destined to become a priest."

She could remember the Xantcha who'd waited, hope against hope, for the tender-priests to come for her. Would she have been happier if they had? There was no Phyrexian word for happiness.

"And my brother?" Urza flicked the shred into the weeds. "Did he become a priest? Is that what I fought in Argoth? His skin had been stretched over metal plates, over coiled wire. What was he?"

"A victim," Ratepe answered before Xantcha had a chance. "What about the demons and the sleepers?"

She chose to answer the easy part first. "Sleepers are newts, uncompleated, the way we came out of the vats. But there's oil in the vats, and the smell never goes away. That's how I spot them."

"This one recognized you?" Ratepe always had another question.

Xantcha shrugged. "Maybe, if I hadn't gotten its attention first." She rubbed the hollow of her neck. "That

left arm, Urza. It shot something new at me. Your armor barely stopped it, and for a moment I was glowing blue. And those canisters you made for the firepots? The glass shards are worthless, but the shrieking ones, they brought this priest to its knees."

Urza snapped the wreck's left arm at the shoulder with no more apparent effort than she'd need to break a twig. He angled it this way and that in the sun as glistening oil poured over his hand.

"Do sleeprs know what they are?" Yet another question from Ratepe.

"I was destined to sleep and I knew, so I assume they know, but I think, lately, that I'm wrong. The sleepers I've seen don't seem to recognize one another, don't seem to know they weren't born. And if you were going to ask-" she pointed to the Efuand corpses-"they're not sleepers."

"How do you know?" Urza demanded. "How can you be certain? They're man-shaped, not like you. And they smell."

Xantcha rolled her eyes. "Gix corrected the man-woman mistake before they excoriated him. Sleepers were men and women before I left the First Sphere. Phyrexians know about gender,

Urza, they've just decided it's the way of flesh and not the way they're going to follow. These Efuands, they've got oil on the outside from handling the ambulator. Right now, you smell of glistening oil. Sleepers have oil on the inside, in their breath."

"So you cover your mouth?" Ratepe asked.

She nodded. He'd watched her do that more than once. "If they're not breathing, you might have to cut them open to be sure."

"Have you cut them open, to be sure?" Urza asked.

Xantcha answered. "I've always been sure."

She met Urza's eyes, they were mortal-brown just then. How many times in the past two hundred years had she sent him out to confirm her sightings? He always said she'd been correct, always told her never to risk encountering them again, but had he ever scented a Dominarian sleeper?

"I have cut them open," Urza confessed. "I've killed and eviscerated men and women because they smelled, faintly, of Phyrexia. But when I examined them outside, I saw only men and women, not what you have become, what my brother became. Even on the inside, there was nothing unusual about them. They had a black mana essence, but essence isn't everything. It doesn't make a man or woman a Phyrexian."

Xantcha didn't know what to say and was grateful when Ratepe asked:

"What about demons?"

"The demons are what they are-and that is an answer. They're as old as Phyrexia, as old as the Ineffable. They're powerful, they're evil. They smell of oil, of course, but, in Phyrexia, I knew a demon when I saw one because I felt fear inside me."

"Mishra met a demon." Ratepe's eyes were glazed. His attention was focused between his ears where he heard the Weakstone sing. "Gix."

The bees in the orchard were louder than Ratepe's whispered declaration, but he got Xantcha's attention and Urza's too.

"Names are just sounds," Urza said, the same as he'd said when Xantcha told him-long before she read The Antiquity Wars-the only demon's name she knew. "The Brotherhood of Gix was ancient before I was born. They venerated mountains, gears, and clockwork. They were susceptible to Phyrexian corruption after my brother and I inadvertently broke the Thran lock against Phyrexia, but neither they nor their god could have been Phyrexian."

"Gix promised everything. He knew how to bring metal to life and life to metal." Ratepe's voice remained soft. It was hard to tell if he was frightened by what he heard in his mind or dangerously tempted by it.

"Ratepe?" Xantcha reached across the wrecked priest to take Ratepe's hand. It was limp and cold. "Those things didn't happen to you. Don't let Gix into your memory. Gix was excoriated more than three thousand years ago, immersed in steaming acid and thrown into the pit. He can't touch you."

"You cannot seriously think that there is a connection between the memories placed in your mind and those in Mishra"s," Urza argued. "At best there is a coincidence of sound, at worst ... remember, Xantcha, your thoughts are not your own! Haven't you learned?"

Still clinging to Ratepe's hand, Xantcha faced Urza. "Why is it that everything you believe is the absolute truth and anything I believe is foolishness? I was meant to sleep here-right here in Dominaria. I dreamed of this place. I was decanted knowing die language that you and Mishra spoke as children. There is something about this world, above all the others, that draws Phyrexia back. They tried to conquer the Thran. That didn't work so they tried to get you and Mishra to conquer each other. Now they're trying a third time. Big wars didn't work, so they're trying lots of little wars. If you would listen to someone else for a change instead of always having to be the only one with the right answers-"

Ratepe squeezed Xantcha's hand and helped her to her feet. "Xantcha's got a point, Urza. Why here? Why do the Phyrexians come back to this world?"

Urza 'walked away rather than answer, and this time he didn't come back.

"I shouldn't have challenged him." Xantcha leaned against Ratepe, grateful to have someone to share her misery with, and aware, too, that she would have spoken much differently if there hadn't been three of them gathered around the Phyrexia wreckage. "I always lose my temper at the wrong time. He was so close to seeing the truth, but I had to have it all."

"You're more like Mishra than I am." Ratepe wrapped his arms around her. "Must've been something Gix poured in your vat."

He was jesting, but the joke made Xantcha's heart skip a beat. What had Oix said on the First Sphere plain? She remembered the spark and walling herself within herself, but the words hung outside of memory's reach. What had happened to Mishra's flesh? Flesh was rendered, never wasted. Had she been growing in the vats while Urza and Mishra fought? She'd thought she had.

Xantcha leaned back against Ratepe's arms and saw the thoughtful look on his face.

"Don't," she said, a plea more than a command. "Don't say anything more. Don't think anything more."

Arms tightened around her, one at her waist, the other cradling her head. She couldn't see his face, but she knew he hadn't stopped thinking.

Xantcha hadn't either, though there was neither joy nor satisfaction in any of her conclusions.

"We've got to leave," she said many silent moments later. "Someone's going to wonder what happened to the riders."

"If we're lucky, someone. Something, if we're not."

Xantcha grimaced. Ratepe's humor was missing its mark, and her arm, compressed between them, kept her edgy with its throbbing. "Whichever, we're going to have to leave this for someone else to sort out. I should've shoved the priest through before we destroyed the ambulator."

"Then there wouldn't have been anything for Urza to look at."

"Not sure whether that was good or bad."

Ratepe let her go and did most of the work assembling their supplies in a pile for the sphere to flow around. One look at his face and Xantcha knew he was disappointed that they weren't returning to Pincar City, but he never raised the subject. Her elbow had swollen to the size of a winter melon and her arm, from the shoulder down, looked as if it had been pumped full of water.

Her fingers resembled five purple sausages. Her arm was rigid, too. It had been centuries since she'd had an injury Urza hadn't healed, She'd almost forgotten how newts stiffened when they broke their bones.

If Xantcha had the nerves Ratepe had been born with, she would have been curled up, whimpering, on the ground. As it was, she was grateful for Ratepe's company, sought the calmest wind-streams through the air, and brought them down frequently.

Twice over the following several days they spotted gangs of bearded men riding good horses through the summer heat. She grit her teeth and followed them, still hoping to find a Shratta stronghold, but both times the men ended their treks peaceably in palisaded villages. Either the religious fanatics had gone to ground or they'd gone from dreaded to welcome in little more than a season. She thought of going up to the gates and inviting herself into their councils, as she had scarcely a season earlier. Her arm kept her from acting on those thoughts.

"It was your idea to disperse those villagers, let them spread the word that it was Red-Stripes who were killing and burning in the Shratta's name," Xantcha reminded Ratepe as she guided the sphere to its prior course. "You're the one who told me that I was a friend because I was the enemy of your enemy. What did you expect?"

"Not this," Ratepe replied with a scowl. "Maybe I'm wiser now. The enemy of my enemy still has his own plans for me."

Xantcha let the provocative comment slide.

High summer was a season of clear, dry weather on Gulmany's north coast. They rounded the western prong of the Ohran Ridge without excitement and hit the first of the big southern coast storms at sunrise the next day. For three days they camped in a bear's hillside den waiting for

the rain to stop. Xantcha's arm turned yellow. Her fingers came back to life, knuckle by spasmed knuckle.

Xantcha was in no hurry to get back to the cottage. Once her elbow recovered from its battering, she could enjoy Ratepe's company, and his attentions. There was always a bit of frustration. She simply didn't have the instincts for romance, or even pleasure, that Ratepe expected her to have. They loved and laughed and argued, walked as much as they soared the windstreams. They didn't see the cottage roof until the moon had swung twice through its phases, and there was a hint of frosts to come in the mountains' morning air.

"He's there," Ratepe said, pointing at the lone figure.

Xantcha blinked to assure herself that her eyes weren't lying, but it was Urza, tall, pale-haired and stripped to the waist beside the hearth, vigorously stirring something that bubbled and glowed in her best stew pot.

She'd always thought of Urza as a scholar, a man whose strength came from his mind, not his body, though Kayla had written that her husband built his own artifacts and had the stamina of an ox. Over the centuries, Urza had become dependent on abstract power, using sorcery or artifice rather than his hands whenever possible. The sight of a tanned, muscular, and sweating Urza left Xantcha speechless.

She would have preferred to approach this unfamiliar Urza cautiously from the side, but he spotted the sphere and waved.

"He seems glad to see us." Ratepe's voice was guarded.

Maybe it wasn't that Phyrexians had no imagination, but that their imaginations never prepared them for the truth. Xantcha reminded herself that Urza had her heart on a shelf. He'd followed it to Efuan Pincat. He could have found her again or crushed the amber stone in his fist.

She brought the sphere down beside the well. Urza ran toward them-ran, as a born-man might run to greet his family. He embraced Ratepe first, slapping him heartily on the back and calling him "brother." Xantcha turned away, telling herself she'd learned her lesson in the apple orchard. Urza didn't have to be sane, he didn't have to see anything except as he wished to see it, as long as he fought the Phyrexians. She hadn't quite finished the self- lecture when Urza put his hands on her shoulders.

"I've been busy," he said. "I went back to all those places I'd been before. I trusted my instincts. If I thought it was Phyrex-ian, I believed it was Phyrexian. I didn't need outside proof.

They have a new strategy, Xantcha. Instead of fighting their own war, or pulling the strings on one big war, they've stirred a hornet's nest of little wars just in Old Terisiare alone. I have no notion what they might be doing elsewhere.

"But I'll find out, Xantcha. I know Dominaria less well than I know a score of other planes, but that's going to change, too. Come, let me show you-"

He pulled Xantcha toward the cottage. She dug in her heels, a futile, but necessary protest.

"No, Xantcha, this time-this time I swear to the Thran, it is not like before." He gestured to Ratepe. "Brother! You come too. I have a plan!"

Urza did have a plan, and it truly was like nothing he'd done before. He'd drawn maps on his walls, maps on the floor, a map on the worktable, and maps on every other reasonably smooth surface in the workroom. No wonder he was working outside. The many-colored maps were annotated with numerals she could read and a script she couldn't. None of them made particular sense until she recognized the crescent-shaped capital of Baszerat on their common wall. After that she recognized several towns and cities, drawn upside down by her instincts, but accurate, so far as she could remember. She guessed the annotations included the number of sleepers he'd found in each city and asked:

"Are you going to drive the sleepers back to Phyrexia?"

"Yes, in proper time. The first time no one was left and the message was lost. The last time, no one knew what we faced until the very end and as you pointed out-" Urza included Ratepe in the discussion-"nobody believed the message. This time I will take no chances. The Phyrexians have chosen to fight a myriad of wars. I will fight them the same way, with a myriad of weapons. I will expose them! Watch!"

Urza left her and Ratepe standing in the middle of the room while he fussed with a tattered basket. His eagerness and delight would have been contagious, if Xantcha hadn't watched too many times before. She'd exchanged a worried- hopeful glance with Ratepe when the world erupted into chaos.

The chaos was a sound like Xantcha had never experienced, sound more piercing than the howling winds between-worlds. She tried to draw breath to yawn out her armor, but the sound had taken possession of her body. It shook her as a dog shook its fur after the rain and threw her to the floor. Her bones had turned to jelly before it reached into her skull and shook her mind out of her brain.

Control and reason returned as suddenly as they had departed. Except for a few bruises and a badly bitten tongue, Xantcha was no worse than dazed. She knew her name and where she was, but the rest was muddled. Ratepe stood a little distance away. Xantcha realized he hadn't been affected by the attack, but before she could consider the implications, Urza was beside her, cupping her chin in his hands, taking the pain away.

"It worked!" he exalted before she could stand. "I'm sorry, but there was no other way, and I had to be sure."

"You? You did that to me?" She propped herself up on one elbow.

"Wind, words, they're both the same. Sound is merely air in motion, like the sea. You said the priest collapsed because of the whistling shot. I have made a new artifact, Xantcha, a potent new weapon. It has no edge, no weight, no fire. It is sound."

Urza opened his hand, revealing a lump roughly the size and shape of a ceiling spider. Xantcha couldn't accept that something so simple had laid her low.

"It's too small," she complained. "Nothing so small could hurt so much."

"You gave me the idea when you said the oil was inside the sleeprs. Sound, if it is the right sound, can move things, break things. The sound this artifact makes is one that shakes glistening oil until it breaks apart."

Xantcha would have said oil could not be broken if she had not just endured a sound that had proven otherwise. "Do we throw them at the sleeprs?"

"We plant them in all the places where Xantcha's scented sleepers," Ratepe said from the wall where he had studied several of the maps.

"Yes! Yes, exactly right, Brother!" Urza left Xantcha on the floor. "We will scatter them like raindrops!"

"What will set them off? They're too small for a wick or fuse."

"Ah, the Glimmer Moon, brother. A strange thing, the Glimmer Moon. It has virtually no effect on tides, but on sorcery- white-mana sorcery-it is like a magnet, pulling the mana toward itself, sometimes strong, sometimes not so strong, but strongest when the Glimmer Moon reaches its zenith. So, very simple, I make a spindly crystal and charge one end with white mana. I put the crystal inside the spider, in a drop of water where it floats on its side. When the Glimmer Moon goes high, it tugs the charged end of the crystal, which stands up in the drop of water, and my little spider makes the noise that affected Xantcha, but not you or I. It is as good as an arrow!"

"But just a bit more complicated," Ratepe warned.

"Geometry, brother," Urza laughed. "Astronomy. Mathematics. You never liked mathematics! Never learned to think in numbers. I have done all the calculations." He gestured at the writing-covered walls.

Xantcha had pulled herself to her feet. Her anger at being tricked had vanished. This was the Urza she'd been waiting for, the artifacts she'd been waiting for. "How powerful are they? I was what, maybe four paces away? How many will we need to flush out all the sleeprs in a city? Hundreds, thousands?"

"Hundreds, maybe, in a town. Thousands, yes, in a city. The more you have, the greater the effect, though you must be very precise when you attach them to the walls. Too far is bad, too close is worse. They'll cancel each other out, and nothing at all will happen. I will show you in each town we pass through. And I will continue to refine them."

Ratepe's face had turned pensive. Xantcha thought it was because he'd play no part in Urza's grand plan, but he proved her wrong, as usual.

"We could just make things worse. I know Xantcha's Phyrex-ian, but when she fell just now I didn't guess she fell because she was Phyrexian. You're going to have something make a noise born-folks can hardly hear, but a few are going to collapse on the ground. People won't know why. They don't cut up corpses, they've never seen a Phyrexian priest. They'll think it's a god's doings and there's no guessing what they'll think after that."

"The sleepers will be gone, Brother. Dead. Lying on the ground. Let men and women think a god has spoken, if that's their desire. Phyrexia will know that Dominaria has struck back; and that's what matters: the message we send to Phyrexia. It is as good as saying that the Thran have returned."

"I'm only saying that if no one knows why, no one will understand, and ignorance is dangerous."

"Then, Brother, what would you have me do?" Urza demanded. "Handwriting in the sky? A whisper in every

Dominarian ear? Would you have another war? Is that what you want, Mishra- another war across Terisiare? This way there is no war. The land is not raped. No one dies."

"The sleepers will die," Xantcha said.

In her mind's eye she saw the First Sphere and the other newts, the other Xantcha with its orange hair. She'd slain newts herself-she'd slain that other Xantcha when it got between her and food-but when she thought about vengeance against Phyrexia, she thought about priests and demons, not newts or sleepers. Her head said they had to be eliminated-killed. The artifact-spider's sound had gripped her. She believed it could kill, but not quickly or painlessly, and if her hunch was correct, that many of the sleepers didn't know they were Phyrexian, they wouldn't know why they suffered.

Ratepe and Urza were watching her.

"They have to die," she said quickly, defensively. "There's no place for them...." A shiver ran down her back. Place, one of the oldest words in her memory. Her cadre never had a place. They were oxen, deprived of everything except their strength, used ruthlessly, discarded as meat when there was nothing left. "I'll do it," she snarled. "Don't worry. Waste not, want not. I'll do whatever has to be done until Phyrexia is rolled up like an ambulator and disappears." Her voice had thickened as it did when she yawned, but her throat was tight with tears, not armor. "But it's not true that no one will die."

Urza strode toward her. "Xantcha," he said softly, insincerely. The open door beckoned. She ran through it. Urza tried to call her back:

"Xantcha, no one's talking about you ... !" She ran too far to hear the rest.