Planeswalker (10 page)

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.