Planeswalker (16 page)

"I won't remain here! Bring back the door. Let me out
or destroy me!"

Urza stared at her hands. "I brought you something.
Swallow it, and I can, as you say, bring back the door."

He held out his free arm and opened his hand which held
a nearly transparent lump about half the size of her fist.
Xantcha had eaten worse meals in the Fane of Flesh, but she
didn't think Urza was offering her supper.

"What is it?" she asked, not letting go with either
hand.

"Consider it a gift. I went back to the plane where I
found you. The Phyrexians were careful to clean up after
themselves, but I was more careful looking for them this
time. I found a place where the soil had been transformed
with black mana, much as you have been. So, I believe you,
Xantcha. You are almost what you say you are, almost a
Phyrexian. You believe the lies they told because when they
transformed you they took your memory and your potential.
You are a danger to others and to yourself but not to me. I
will unlock your secrets and find answers I need for my
vengeance."

"I'll help," Xantcha agreed. She'd agree to anything to
get out of the chamber. After that...

After that would take care of itself.

Letting go of his sleeve with one hand but not the
other, she reached for the lump. Urza swung it beyond her
reach.

"You must understand, Xantcha, as much as you can
understand anything. This is not bread to be wolfed down
like a starving animal. This is an artifact. When you
swallow it, it will settle in your stomach and harden into
a cyst, a sort of stone that will remain there for as long
as you live. Then, whenever we travel between planes or
dwell on a plane where you could not otherwise survive, you

will say a little rhyme that I shall teach you and yawn
mightily at its end. The cyst will release an armor that
will cover you completely to keep you alive."

"You will compleat me?"

Urza glowered. Xantcha felt him pursuing her thoughts,
her suspicions about the cyst. He rummaged through her
memories, yanking on them as if they were the loose ends of
a stubborn knot. Did he believe Orman'huzra knew nothing
about artifacts? She retreated into her private self.

He sensed her escape. She saw the questions and
displeasure on his face. Urza wasn't flesh, no more than
Gix, but he had the habits of flesh and all the subtlety of
a freshly decanted newt.

"Like a rabbit flees into the brush," he said, and
looked beyond the chamber. Tears leaked from Urza's eyes,
especially his left eye. Then he shuddered, and the tear
tracks vanished. "No, I don't compleat. That is
abomination. My artifact will be inside you, because that
is the best place for it, but is a tool, nothing more and
never a part of you. Never! I cannot erase the memories of
Phyrexia from your mind-and would not, because they will
prove useful to my vengeance-but you are no longer
Phyrexian, and you must not think of Phyrexian
abominations."

"Artifacts are tools," she recited as she would have
once recited to the teacher-priests. A tool that she would
swallow, but that would remain in her belly forever but
without becoming a part of her. It wasn't reasonable, but
reason wasn't important to a Phyrexian, and she would be
Phyrexian forever.

Urza let the lump flow into her hand. It was cold and
clinging. Xantcha's stomach churned in protest. Gagging,
she lost her grip on Urza's sleeve and nearly dropped the
artifact as well.

"Swallow it whole. Don't chew on it!"

"Waste not, want not," Xantcha muttered. "Waste not,
want not."

She raised her hand to her mouth and nearly fainted.
She tried again, breathing out as she raised her hand. The
artifact quivered and darkened. Then she closed her eyes
and slurped it down without inhaling. It stuck in her
throat. She slapped her hands over her lips, fighting the
instinct to spit the lump across the chamber.

For something that was only a tool, Urza's artifact
felt alive as it oozed down Xantcha's throat, got
comfortable in her gut, and hardened into a stone. She was
on her knees, banging her forehead on the floor when the
horrifying process finally stopped.

"See? All over. Nothing to it."

She rested her head on the floor another moment before
pushing herself upright.

"I'm ready."

Her voice felt different. The artifact had deposited a
trail as it had moved down her throat. It still clung to
her teeth and tongue. She coughed into her hand and studied
drops of spittle that glistened briefly then turned to
white powder. Urza taught her the rhyme that would release
the cyst's power. Pressure built in her gut as she repeated
it. The yawn that followed was involuntary, and the
sensation of an oily liquid surging from within, covering

her completely within two heartbeats, would have driven her
to hysteria if it had lasted for a third.

Urza clutched her wrists. The cyst's liquid-her armor-
tingled. He began to fade and, looking down, Xantcha saw
herself fading as well.

She'd barely begun to scream when her substance was
restored, covered by clothing less fine than Urza's, but
finer than the rags she'd known all her life. Tempted to
fondle the dark blue sleeve, she discovered it was
illusion, visible but intangible.

"Later," Urza assured her. "Not long. I won't have a
naked companion. Look upon this ... Tell me: Have you
ever seen its like beforeT

Xantcha gathered her wits. They stood on a bare-rock
plain. The sky was a cloudless pale blue; light came from
an intensely white sun-star so high overhead that she
thought she should have been hot and sweating. Yet the
plain was cold, the wind colder. She could hear the wind
and see the dust it raised. When she thought about it,
Xantcha wasn't at all sure how she knew it was cold. With
Urza's armor surrounding her, she felt nothing against her
skin. The sensation, or lack of sensation, so intrigued her
that Urza had to clear his throat twice before she saw the
dragon.

"With that," he said, pride evident in his voice, "I
shall destroy Phyrexia."

The dragon was dead black in the sunlight. Xantcha
walked closer until she was certain that it was, indeed,
made from a metal, though even when she touched a pillar-
like hind leg, she couldn't say which metal. It was bipedal
in structure, and her head came barely to its bent knees.
Its torso, as yet unfinished, was a maze of tanks and
tubes.

"Naphtha," Urza explained before she asked her
question. "Phyrexians, the Phyrexians I mean to destroy,
are sleeked with oil. They burn."

Xantcha nodded, recalling the Fourth Sphere lakes of
slag and naphtha and the screams that sometimes arose from
them. Scaffolding struts extruded from the dragon's
counterbalancing tail. She seized one. Urza warned her to
be careful; she had no intention of being anything else,
but he'd asked a question and she meant to give him an
honest answer.

The cyst-made armor moved with her however Xantcha
contorted herself, even hanging by one knee to get a better
look at the claws on the dragon's somewhat short arms. If
its arms were short, its teeth were long and varied: sharp
spikes, razor-edge wedges, rasps, and crushing anvils, all
cunningly geared so that whoever sat in the Urza-sized gap
between the dragon's shoulders could bring his best metal
weapons to bear on a particular enemy-if a gout of flaming
naphtha proved insufficient to destroy them.

More unfinished scaffolding rose above and behind the
dragon's shoulders: protection, she guessed, for Urza, but
possibly he intended to finish his engine with wings. She
judged it little more than half finished and already
heavier than anything she'd seen on the First Sphere.
Perhaps he'd concocted a more potent fuel than glistening
oil. Xantcha finished her exploration without finding the
source of the engine's power.

After dangling from the dragon's forearm, Xantcha
dropped three or four times her height. She was out of
practice, hitting her chin on her knee as she absorbed the
impact. Her Up should have been a bloody mess. She was
pleasantly impressed with Urza's gift, but as for his
dragon ...

"If you had a hundred of them-" Her voice was
definitely thicker, deeper, and distant-sounding to her
armor-plugged ears. "You could take one of the Fanes and
hold it against the demons, but not against the Ineffable."

"You don't appreciate what this is, Xantcha. I have
built a dragon ten times stronger than anything Mishra or I
had during our misbegotten war. When it is finished, not
even the Thran could stand against it."

Xantcha shrugged. She didn't know the Thran. "It will
have to be very powerful, then, when it is finished."

"You have been blinded, Xantcha, by what they did to
you, by what you can't remember, but they are not as
powerful as they've made you believe. When my dragon is
finished-when I've found the rest of what I need-"

"Found?" Her scavenging curiosity had been aroused.
"You found this? You did not make it, as you made the bread
and tool?"

"I found the materials, Xantcha, and I shaped them to
my needs. To make a dragon like this, to make it as I made
your bread ... even for me it would be exhausting, and in
the end-" Urza lowered his voice-"not quite real."

Xantcha cocked her head.

"That bread filled your stomach and was nutritious. It
would keep you alive, but you wouldn't thrive on it-at
least, I don't think you would. When I was a man, I could
not have thrived on it. Things that are made, whether they
are made from nothing or something else, no matter how well
made they are, aren't quite real. It's easier-better-to
start with something similar to what you want to have at
the end and change it, little by little."

"Compleat it?"

"Yes-" Urza began, then stopped suddenly and stared
harshly at her, eyes a-shimmer. "No. Compleation is a
Phyrexian taint. Do not use that word. Only artifacts can
be made. Everything else must be born, must live and grow."

Xantcha studied her companion with equal intensity,
though her eyes, of course, could not sparkle. "We were
taught that the Ineffable made Phyrexia."

"Lies, Xantcha. They told you lies."

"I was told many lies," she agreed.

Urza took her wrists again.

"Until now," he said, "I have dwelt here beside my
greatest artifact, but now that I have taken charge of you,
I will have to have a dwelling in a more hospitable place.
It is no great inconvenience. For every hospitable plane
there are several out-of-the-way planes such as this. While
these plains have supplied me with the ores I needed for my
dragon's bones, they aren't where power-stones are to be
found."

Xantcha had started to ask what a powerstone was when
her armor began to tingle and Urza began to grow
transparent in the stark sunlight. They were underway
before Xantcha could ask where they were going, and though
she'd already guessed that her image for a world was the

same as Urza's image for a plane, getting dragged from one
world to the next with his hands clamped around her wrists
was worse than sinking through the ambulators.

Whether her eyes were open or closed, Xantcha saw the
same many-colored streaks whirling around her. Every sense,
every perception was stretched to its opposite extreme and
held there for what might have been a single moment or
might have been eternity. The silence was deafening, the
cold so intense she feared she'd melt, the viselike
pressure so great she feared she'd explode. And, to
complete the experience, when Urza finally released
Xantcha, her clinging armor transformed abruptly into a
layer of white paste.

Pushed past her limit, Xantcha gave into the panic and
terror, clawing the residue as she ran blindly away from
Urza. She tripped, as was inevitable, and fell hard enough
to knock the wind from her. Urza knelt and touched her. The
armor residue was gone in an instant.

"I tested it on myself," he explained. He helped her to
her feet and laid his hands on her scrapes and bruises,
healing them with gentle heat.

Xantcha had endured much in her unmeasured life, none
of it gentle. She pulled away when she could and realized
he'd brought her back to the place where she'd been beaten.
Parting her lips, she tasted the air; the tang of
glistening oil was faint, stale.

"They're gone," she said.

"And not long after I rescued you. The locals would not
know the Phyrexians had ever been here. I would not have
known, if I had not found them first. This is the place,
the very place, where they brought you and where the last
of them stood before leav-ing."

Urza scuffed the ground with his boot. There was
nothing visibly different, but movement released the scent
of glistening oil to the air.

"It is a familiar place for you, isn't it? You lived
here, found food here. Conquer your nightmares, Xantcha.
The Phyrexians will not return. They are cowards, Xantcha;
they only prey upon the weak. They grasped my brother, but
they never came to me. They know me, Xantcha, and they will
not return. This will be the place where you can dwell
while I complete my dragon, the place where you can lay out
your wretched memories for my understanding."

Xantcha tried to understand her new companion and
failed. He was wrong, simply wrong, about so many things,
yet he had the power to walk between worlds. No Phyrexian,
not even a demon like Gix, could do that. Urza did not give
orders, not in a Phyrexian sense. Still, Xantcha had no
alternative but to obey him as she'd obeyed Gix, silently
and without grace. She started up the path to the caves.

"Where are you going?"

Let him haul her back; he had that power. Or let him
follow, which he did.

The cave was sealed, of course, and carefully, with
stones, dirt, and plant life. The locals, as Urza had
called them, wouldn't know the treasures of their ancestors
had been plundered, but Xantcha knew. She began pulling
weeds and hurling dirt with her bare hands.