Planeswalker

CHAPTER 6

They didn't talk much after that. Xantcha let the fire burn down, and Rat made no attempt to revive it, choosing instead to pull his borrowed cloak tight around his shoulders. As little as he seemed to want to talk, Rat seemed reluctant to give his body the rest it needed. Three times Xantcha watched him slump sideways only to jolt himself upright. Exhaustion won the fourth battle. His chin touched his chest, and his whole body curled forward. He'd find himself in a world of pain when he woke up.

Xantcha touched Rat's arm gently and when that failed to rouse him, eased him to the ground, which was dry and no worse than wherever he might have slept last. He pulled his arms tight against his chest. Xantcha tried to straighten them but met resistance. His fists and jaw remained clenched even in sleep.

She'd thought that kind of tension was unique to Urza, to Urza's madness, but perhaps Rat's conscience was equally guilt-wracked. Whatever lies he'd told her and Assor, he'd been through hard times. His stained and aromatic clothes had once been sturdy garments, cut and sewn so carefully that their seams still held. Not slave's clothing, no more than his shoes were a slave's shoes. They were missing their buckles and had been shredded where the fetters rubbed against them.

If Xantcha were wiser in the ways of mortal misfortune, she might have read Rat's true history in the moonlight. Xantcha knew more about the unusual aspects of a hundred out-of-the-way worlds than she knew about ordinary life anywhere. The two and a half centuries she and Urza had spent in Dominaria was the most time she'd spent in any single place, and though she'd taught herself to read and traveled at every opportunity, all she'd really learned was the extent of her ignorance.

Xantcha's day hadn't been so exhausting as Rat's. She could have stayed awake all night and perhaps tomorrow night, if there'd been any need. But the night was calm, and although Rat's plight proved that there were slavers loose in Efuan Pincar, tonight they were in empty country, far from towns or villages. Xantcha heard owls and other night birds. Earlier she'd heard a wild cat yowling, but nothing large, nothing to keep her from settling down near Rat's feet, one arm touching his chain so she'd know if he moved unwisely during the night.

Were their positions reversed, Xantcha wouldn't have tried to escape. In her long experience, the unknown had never proven more hospitable than the known. She hadn't thought of escape in all the time she was a newt among Phyrexians, although that, she supposed, had been different. A better comparison might be her first encounter with Urza... .

After Gix's excoriation, Xantcha had hidden among the Fourth Sphere gremlins, but they'd eventually betrayed her to the Fane of Flesh. The teacher-priests caught her and punished her and then sent her to the furnaces. Xantcha worked beside metal-sheathed stokers. The hot, acrid air had burned her lungs. She'd staggered under the impossible burdens they piled on her back. It was no secret, the remains of Gix's newts were to be used up as quickly as possible, but when Xantcha's strength gave out, it was a burnished stoker who stumbled over her fallen body and plunged into a crucible of molten brass.

The fire-priests wouldn't have her after that, so the Fane sent Xantcha to the arena, where Phyrexian warriors honed their skills against engines and artifacts made in Phyrexia or creatures imported from other worlds. She was assigned tasks no warrior would have dared: feeding the creatures, repairing damaged engines, and destroying those artifacts the warriors had merely damaged. Her death had been expected, even anticipated, but when the fearsome wyverns with their fiery eyes and razor claws went on a rampage that reduced a hundred priests and warriors to oil- caked rubble, Xantcha the newt had survived without a scratch.

Since she wouldn't die and they'd failed to kill her, the planner-priests decided that Xantcha had the makings of a dodger.

Before he'd closed his eyes in sleep, the Ineffable had decreed that Phyrexia must be relentless in its exploration of other worlds and in the exploitation of whatever useful materials, methods and artifacts that exploration uncovered. Exploration was the easy part. A compleat Phyrexian, sheathed in metal and bathed in glistening oil, was thorough and precise. It was incapable of boredom and, when ordered to examine everything, it did exactly that, as accurate at the end as it had been in the beginning.

But confronted with something they'd never seen before, lesser Phyrexians often became confused, and through their rough bumbling they frequently destroyed not only themselves but whatever they'd been examining as well. It was an intolerable situation and necessitated an unpleasant

solution. Whole colonies of gremlins were endured, even nurtured, for their canniness and spontaneity, but no gremlin was cannier than the remnants of Gix's newts; the ones that refused to die.

There were twenty of them summoned to the fountain, as identical as ever. They couldn't drink the glistening oil, so they were bathed in it while rows and ranks of compleat Phyrexians watched in silence. A mobile planner-priest described their new destiny:

Go forth with the diggers and the bearers. Gaze upon the creations of born minds. Decipher their secrets so that they may be exploited safely for the glory and dominion of Phyrexia.

There'd been more. Compleat Phyrexians never suffered from fatigue during an endless oration. They had no tongues to turn thick or pasty from overuse. And, of course, they lacked imagination. Never mind that Urza ridiculed Xantcha's imagination; she had more than the rest of Phyrexia rolled together. Standing beside the fountain, slick with glistening oil, Xantcha had imagined a wondrous future.

Her future began on a world whose name she had never known. Perhaps the searcher-priests had known its name when they came to investigate it, but once they discovered something useful to Phyrexia, the name of the place where they'd found it was of little importance to the team of diggers, bearers, and dodgers sent to exploit the discovery.

Once the ambulator portals were configured, it didn't matter where a world truly lay. Just one step forward into the glassy black disk the searcher-priests unrolled across the ground and whoosh, the team was where it needed to be. When the team finished its work-usually an excavation and extraction-they'd pack everything up, stride into the ambulator's nether end (identical to the prime end, except that it lacked the small configuration panel) and whoosh, they were back where they started, waiting for the next assignment.

The ambulators were horrible artifacts: suffocating, freezing, and endless, and a dodger's work was worse than cleaning up after the warriors. The chief digger would lead a newt, and a gremlin or two to whatever artifact had roused the searcher-priests' attention, then sit back at a safe distance while dodgers did the dangerous work. Much of what the teams excavated was abandoned weapons, frequently still primed and hair-triggered; the rest, while not intended as weapons, still had a tendency to explode.

Xantcha quickly realized that gremlins weren't any more imaginative than Phyrexians. They were simply more expendable. That very first time outside the nether end of an ambulator, when she saw blue-gray gremlin hands reaching for the shiniest lever in sight, Xantcha had decided she'd work alone and thrust her knife through the gremlin's throat before his imagination got her killed. The diggers hadn't cared. They only cared that she found and disconnected the tiny wires between that lever and a throbbing crimson crystal deep within the artifact.

After the bearers got the inert crystal back to Phyrexia, a herald had conducted Xantcha to one of the great obsidian Fanes of the First Sphere, where the

planner-priests-second only to the demons in Phyrexia's complex hierarchy-interrogated her about the excavation and the insights that had inspired her as she disconnected the wires. They demanded that she attach the crystal to the immense body of one of the planners. Which Xantcha did, having no other alternative to obedience. No one was more surprised than Xantcha herself when both she and the planner survived.

The herald gave her a cloak of golden mesh and a featureless mask before conducting her back to the Fourth Sphere. For the first time, Xantcha looked like a compleat Phyrexian-provided she stood still.

Diggers and bearers had been compleated with scrap: bits of brass, copper, and tin. Their leather-patched joints leaked oil with every move. They were not pleased to have a gold-clad newt in their midst. Her life had never been gentle, but everything Xantcha had endured until then had derived from indifference. It wasn't until she'd been rewarded by the planners that she experienced personal hatred and cruelty.

Beneath Xantcha's arm, the iron chain shifted slightly. Her fingers clamped over the shifting links before her eyes were open, but the movement was merely Rat shifting in his sleep. A blanket of clouds had unfurled between them and the moon. The land had gone quiet; Xantcha sniffed for storms or worse and found the air as empty as before. She loosened her grip on the chain without releasing it completely.

Rat would run. Though he remained fettered and had no hope of survival in the open country, he'd try to run as long as he believed freedom lay somewhere else.

There was no word for freedom in Phyrexian. The only freedom a Phyrexian knew was the effortless movement of metal against metal when each piece was cushioned in glistening oil, and even that freedom was inaccessible to a flesh-bound newt. Battered and starved by the diggers who depended on her for their own survival, Xantcha had taken refuge in endurance. Though none of the worlds she'd visited matched the moist, green world of her dreams-in truth, Dominaria itself didn't match those dreams-the worst of them had been more hospitable than Phyrexia.

And if perversity were a proper measure of accomplishment, then Xantcha took perverse pride in surmounting the challenge she found at the nether end of each ambulator portal. Once an artifact lay exposed in front of her, she'd forget the diggers' prejudice, the bearers' brutality. Every artifact was different, yet they were all the same, too, and if Xantcha studied them long enough-whether they'd been made by Urza, Phyrexia, or some nameless artificer on a nameless world-she'd eventually unravel their secrets.

Xantcha would never be truly compleat, but she had achieved usefulness. She'd become a dodger, the fifth dodger, by virtue of the crimson sphere, which began a revolution in the way Phyrexia powered its largest non- sentient artifacts. A few more finds and she'd become the second dodger, Orman'huzra, though in her thoughts she

remained Xantcha. The teacher-priests were right about some things: Oix's newts were too old, too set to change.

There was no Phyrexian word for happiness, and contentment meant glistening oil, yet as Orman'huzra, Xantcha found a measure of both. The others might despise her, but with her gold-mesh cloak she was untouchable. And they needed her. Within their carapaces, Phyrexians were alive; they understood death and feared it more than a newt did because without flesh, compleat Phyrexians could not heal themselves, and scrap-made Phyrexians were almost as expendable as newts.

The next turning point in Xantcha's life came in the windswept mountains of a world with three small moons. The artifact was huge and ringed by the rotting flesh of the born-folk who'd died defending it. Countless hollow crystals, no two exactly alike, pierced its dark, convoluted surface. Flexible wires had sprouted among the crystals, each supporting a concave mirror.

When the mirrors moved, sound and sometimes light emerged from the hollow crystals.

The searcher-priests had been certain it was a weapon of unparalleled power.

Disable it, the searcher had told her. Prepare it for bearing back to Phyrexia. Do not attempt to dismantle it. The born-folk fought hard. They could not defeat us, yet they did not retreat. They died to keep us from this artifact. Therefore we must have it, and auickly.

Xantcha didn't need reasons. The artifact-any artifact- was sufficient. Solving each artifact's mystery was all that mattered to her. What the priests did with her discoveries didn't concern her. From a newt's vulnerable perspective, a new weapon meant nothing. Everything in Phyrexia was already deadly.

Ignoring the corpses, she'd approached the artifact as she'd approached all the others.

But the wind-crystal, as she named it, wasn't a weapon. Its crystals and mirrors had no power except what they borrowed from the sun, moons, wind, and rain; then they gave it back as patterns of light and sound. The artifact reached deep into Xantcha's dreams, where it awakened the notions of beauty that couldn't be expressed in Phyrexian words.

Xantcha refused to prepare the artifact as the searcher-priests had demanded. She told the diggers and bearers, It has no secrets, nothing that Phyrexia can use. It simply is, and it belongs here. She was Orman'huzra, and the immobile planner-priests of the First Sphere had given her a golden cloak. She'd thought her words would have weight with the scrappy diggers and bearers; and they had, in ways Xantcha hadn't imagined. They stripped away her golden cloak and beat her bloody. They destroyed the artifact, every crystal, every mirror. Then they told the searchers that Orman'huzra was to blame for the loss of a weapon that could reduce whole worlds to dust.

Battered and scarcely conscious, Xantcha had been dragged to the brink of the very same fumarole where Gix had fallen to the Seventh Sphere. One push and life would have ended for her, but Xantcha was made of flesh and the planner-priests had believed that flesh could be punished until it transformed itself. From the fumarole Xantcha was

taken to a cramped cell, where she dwelt in darkness for some small portion of eternity, sustained by memories of dancing light and music. When the priests thought she had suffered enough, they dragged her out again. The searchers had found another inscrutable artifact on another nameless world.

Xantcha was Orman'huzra. She was still useful and she had the wit-the deceit-to grovel before the various priests, begging for her life on any terms they offered. They sent her back to work never guessing that a lowly newt, mourning the loss of beauty, had declared war on Phyrexia.

The diggers suspected, but the great priests paid no more attention to diggers than they did to newts, and suspicion notwithstanding, diggers who worked with Orman'huzra lasted longer than those who didn't. As soon as she finished with one extraction, she'd find herself assigned to another team.

Thirty artifacts and twenty-two worlds after being dragged out of her cell, Xantcha's war was going well. She hadn't destroyed every artifact they sent her to unravel, but she'd lost several and rigged several more so that the next Phyrexian who touched it never touched anything again. She grew quite pleased with herself.

The diggers were already in place when Xantcha arrived, alone and nauseous from the ambulator trek, on her twenty- third world. A rattling digger made of metal and leather, all of it slick with oil that stank rather than glistened, led her into a humid cave where rows of smoky meat-fat lanterns marked the excavation.

"They might be Phyrexian," the digger said as they approached the main trench. At least, that's what Xantcha thought it had said. Its voice box worked no better than the rest of it.

Xantcha peered into the trenches, into a pair of fire- faceted eyes, each larger than her skull. She sat on her ankles, slowly absorbing what the searchers had found this time.

"They might be Phyrexian," the digger repeated.

Whatever the artifact was, it wasn't Phyrexian and neither were the ranks and rows of partially excavated specimens behind it. Phyrexians were useful. Tender-priests compleated newt-flesh according to its place in the Ineffable's plan, and then they stopped. Function was everything. These artifacts had no apparent function. They seemed, at first and second glance, to be statues: metal reproductions of the crawling insects that, like rats and buzzards, flourished everywhere, including Phyrexia. And though Xantcha had no liking for things that buzzed or stung, what she saw reminded her more of the long-destroyed wind-crystal than the digger beside her.

"I am told to ask, what will you need to secure them for bearing?"

Xantcha shook her head. Mostly the searcher-priests looked for sources of metal and oil because Phyrexia had none of its own; artifacts were a bonus, but the gems and precious metals that compleated the higher priests came to Phyrexia in the form of plunder.

It didn't take Orman'huzra to secure plunder.

There had to be more, and to find it Xantcha seized a

lantern and leapt into the trench where the stronger but far less agile digger couldn't follow. At arm's length she realized that the insects were fully articulated. Whoever made them had meant them to move. She touched a golden plate; it was as warm as her own flesh and vibrated faintly.

Forgetting the digger on the trench-rim, Xantcha ran to one of the second-rank artifacts. It, too, was warm and vibrating, but unlike the first artifact, it had a steel- toothed mouth and steel claws-as nasty as any warrior's pincers-in addition to its golden carapace. On impulse, Xantcha tried to bend the raised edge of a golden plate.

A long, segmented antenna whipped around Xantcha's arm and hurled her against the trench wall, but not before she had the answer she wanted. The plate hadn't bent. It looked like gold, but it was made from something much stronger. Xantcha had another, less wanted, answer too. The artifacts were aware, possibly sentient and at least partially powered.

"Move! Move!" the rattletrap digger shrieked from the rim, less warning or concern for a damaged companion than a reaction to the unexpected.

Sure enough a reeking handful of diggers and bearers came clattering, some through the trenches and others along the rim.

One digger, in better repair than the rest, assumed command, demanding quiet from his peers and an explanation from Orman'huzra.

"Simple enough. It moved and I didn't dodge."

A cacophony of squeaks and trills echoed through the cave, as the diggers and bearers succumbed to laughter.

The better-made digger whistled for silence. "They have not moved. They do not move."

Xantcha displayed her welted arm. Sometimes, there was no arguing with flesh. Diggers did not have articulated faces, yet the chief digger contrived a worried look.

"You will secure them," it said, a command, not a request.

"I will need wire-" Xantcha began, then hesitated as half-formed plots competed in her head.

The searchers must have known that the shiny insects were more than plunder but the diggers and bearers, despite their trench excavations, hadn't known the artifacts could move. She stared at the huge, faceted eyes, fiery in reflected lantern light. The insects weren't Phyrexian; perhaps they could be enlisted in her private war against Phyrexia, if she could get them through intact and without getting herself killed in the process.

"Strong wire," she amended. "And cloth ... thick, heavy cloth. And food ... something to eat and not reeking oil."

"Cloths?" the digger whirled its mouth parts in confusion. Only newts, gremlins and the highest strata of priests draped their bodies in cloth.

"Unmade clothes," Xantcha suggested. "Or soft leather. Something ... anything so I can cover their eyes."

The digger chattered to itself. The tender-priests could replace a newt's eyes, if its destiny called for a different sort of vision, but diggers had flesh-eyes within their immobile faces. This one had pale blue eyes that

widened slowly with comprehension.

"Diggers will find," it said, then spun its head around and issued commands to its peers in the rapid, compleat Phyrexian way that Xantcha could understand but never duplicate. Fully half of them rumbled immediately toward the cave's mouth. The chief digger turned back to Xantcha. "Orman'huzra, begin."

And she did, walking the trenches, examining the insect artifacts already excavated. Xantcha counted the golden, humming creatures that were visible. She climbed out of the trenches and measured the rest of the dig site with her eyes. The cave could easily contain an army. Xantcha hadn't been on this world long enough to know the measure of its day, but it seemed safe to think that she'd need at least a local season, maybe a local year, to get her warriors ready for their war.

Xantcha approached the golden swarm cautiously, starting with those she judged least likely to sever an arm or neck if she made a mistake-which she did several times before she learned what awakened them and what didn't. An isolated touch was more dangerous than a solid thwack to an armored underbelly, and they were much more sensitive to her flesh than to the diggers' shovel-hands.

She foresaw problems inciting her army to fight back in Phyrexia and studied the artifacts by herself, whenever rain drove all but a few diggers and bearers to the shelter beside the ambulator. Rain, especially a cold, penetrating rain, was a poorly-compleated Phyrexian's greatest enemy. The bearers would retreat all the way to Phyrexia once a storm started. Xantcha could have won her private war with just a few of the mud-swirling, gully-washing deluges that threatened the artifact cave as the world's seasons progressed.

Cold rain and mud weren't Xantcha's favorite conditions either. She commandeered pieces of the digger-scrounged cloth, which was, in fact, clothing for folk generally taller and broader than Xantcha herself. The garments were torn, often slashed, and always bloodstained. They rotted quickly in the wretched weather and when they grew too offensive, Xantcha would throw the cloth on her fire and find something fresh in the scrounge piles. Her need for Phyrexian vengeance hadn't led to any empathy for bom-folk.

She successfully dismantled one of the smaller insect- artifacts and learned enough of its secrets to feel confident that they would awaken, as soon as they emerged from the Phyrexian prime end of the ambulator. After that, it was simply a matter of folding their legs and antennae, binding them with cloth and wire, and ordering the bearers to stack them in pyramid layers near the nether end for eventual transfer to Phyrexia.

It never occurred to her that the bearers would act on their own to carry the artifacts with them when they next escaped the rain, and by the time she realized that they had, it was already too late. There was a searcher-priest towering above the diggers and bearers.

"Orman'huzra," the searcher-priest called in that menacing tone only high-ranking Phyrexians could achieve. "You were told to secure these artifacts for Phyrexia. You were warned that inefficiency would not be tolerated. You have failed in both regards. The artifacts you subverted

were dismantled before they could cause any damage."

The many-eyed searcher was between Xantcha and the cave mouth. There'd be no getting past it or getting through the massed diggers and bearers, if she'd been tempted to run, which she wasn't. Xantcha might dream of lush, green worlds, but she was Phyrexian, and though she'd learned how to declare war against her own kind, she hadn't learned how to disobey. When the priest called her forward, she threw down her tools and climbed out of the trench.

Diggers and bearers formed a ring around her and the searcher-priest. They chittered among themselves. This time Orman'huzra had gone too far and would not survive the searcher-priest's wrath.

"Dig," the searcher-priest commanded, and she understood what they intended for her.

Xantcha dug the damp ground until she'd scratched out a shallow hole as wide as her shoulders and as long as she was tall. There was nothing worse than a too short, too narrow prison. Her fingers were numb and bloodied, but she clawed the ground until the searcher-priest grew impatient and ordered a digger to finish the job. When it was done, the hole tapered from shallow to waist-deep along its length and was exactly the length and width Xantcha had laid out.

She'd been through this before and, with a sigh, jumped into the hole, her feet landing in the deeper end, ready to be buried alive.

"Not yet," the searcher-priest said as a length of segmented wire unwound from its arm.

Xantcha recognized it as the antenna from one of her insect warriors. She climbed out of the hole prepared for pain, prepared for death, because she was certain that the searcher-priest had lied. Only a few of her warriors had gotten to Phyrexia, and undoubtedly all of them had fallen by now, but at least one had done damage before it fell.

That was victory enough, as Xantcha's wrists were bound by a length of wire slung over a tree limb to keep her upright during the coming ordeal. It had to be enough, as the first lash stroke of the antenna cut through her ragged clothing, and the second cut deep into her flesh.

The diggers and bearers counted the strokes; lesser Phyrexians were very good at counting. Xantcha heard them count to twenty. After that, everything was blurred. She thought she heard the cry of forty and fifty, but that might have been a dream. She hoped it was a dream. Then it seemed that there was a stroke that didn't land on het and wasn't counted by the diggers and bearers. That, too, might have been a dream, except there were no strokes after that, and no one pushing her into what would almost certainly have been a permanent grave.

Instead there was bright light and great noise.

A storm, Xantcha thought slowly. Rain. Driving the diggers, bearers and even the searcher-priest to shelter. Her wounds had begun to hurt. Drowning would be a better, easier way to die.

Without the diggers and bearers to do the counting, there was no way to measure the time she slumped beneath the tree limb, unable to stand or fall. In retrospect, it could not have been very long before she heard a voice speaking the language of her dreams, the language that had

given her the words for beauty.

Xantcha did notice that she didn't fall when her arms did and that the rain never fell.

The voice filled her head with comforting sounds. Then a hand, that was both warm and soft like her own, touched her face and closed her eyes.

When she awoke next, she was in a grave of pain and fire, but the voice was in her head telling her that fear was unnecessary, even harmful to her healing. She remembered her eyes and, opening them, looked upon a flaming specter with many-colored eyes. Xantcha thought of Gix, and for the first time in her life she fainted.

The next time Xantcha awoke the pain and fire were gone. She was weak, but whole, and lying on softness such as she had not felt since leaving the vats. A man hovered beside her, staring into the distance. She had the strength for one word and chose it carefully.

"Why?"

His face, worried as he stared, turned grim when he looked down.

"I thought the Phyrexians would kill you."

Beyond doubt, he spoke the language of Xantcha's dreams, the language of the place where she had been destined to sleep. He knew the name of her place, too, and had correctly guessed that the Phyrexians meant to kill her, but he hadn't seemed to recognize that she was also Phyrexian. Waves of caution washed through Xantcha's weakened flesh. She fought to hide her shivering.

A piece of cloth covered her. He pulled it back, revealing her naked flesh. His frown deepened.

"I thought they'd captured you. I thought they would change you, as they changed my brother. But I was too late. You bled. There is no metal or oil beneath your skin, but they'd already made you one of them. Do you remember who you were, child? Why did they take you? Did you belong to a prominent family? Where were you born?"

She took a deep breath. Honesty, under the present circumstances seemed the best course, as it had been with Gix, for surely this man was a demon. And, just as surely, he was already at war with Phyrexia. "I was not born, I have no family and I was never a child. I am the Orman'huzra who calls herself Xantcha. I am Phyrexian; I belong to Phyrexia."

He made white-knuckled fists above Xantcha's face. She closed her eyes, lacking the strength for any other defense, but the blows didn't fall.

"Listen to me closely, Xantcha. You belong to me, now. After what was done to you, for whatever reason it was done, you have no cause for love or loyalty to Phyrexia, and if you're clever, you'll tell me everything you know, starting with how you and the others planned to get home."

Xantcha was clever. Gix himself had conceded that. She was clever enough to realize that this yellow-haired man was both more and less than he seemed. She measured her words carefully. "There is a shelter at the bottom of the hill. Take me there. I will show you the way to Phyrexia."