Planeswalker (11 page)

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?"