Planeswalker (18 page)

Expecting an explosion, Xantcha skidded off the trail
and hid behind the largest tree she saw. There was no
explosion, but when she poked her head around the tree
trunk fire rippled across the ambulator disk's surface. She
had no idea if the priest had survived. For that matter,
Xantcha didn't know if the ambulator had survived. Urza
wouldn't welcome the sight of her, not when he'd told her
to stay far away, but Xantcha thought it best to warn him.
She stepped in front of the dragon when it burnt a path
through the trees. Urza shot flame to the left of her and
flame to the right. Xantcha ran until she was breathless,
then circled back. The dragon sat beside the ambulator; the
saddle-seat between its shoulders was empty.

Urza had gone to Phyrexia alone.

Xantcha settled down to wait. Morning became afternoon.
The sky darkened, and the dragon's eyes shone red.

Urza returned, not through the ambulator but in a blaze
of lightning, and Xantcha did nothing to attract his
attention as he remounted the dragon. Moments later they

were gone.

The storm ended quickly. The ambulator beckoned. It
wasn't broken. For the last time, Xantcha asked herself:

Was her heart important enough to risk everything to
rescue it? The priests lied about so many things; only a
fool could believe they hadn't lied about newt hearts. Try
as she might, Xantcha couldn't remember exactly what hers
had looked like; mottled amber, perhaps, with bright
rainbow inclusions. She'd only seen it that once and never
seen another. Only a fool. .. And she was a fool.

On hands and knees, Xantcha crept up to the ambulator
and was surprised to discover that the searchers had left
the prime end in the forest. She began unanchoring it,
careful not to disturb the hard panel where seven jet-black
jewels were set in a silver matrix. When the ambulator was
loose and rippling, Xantcha yawned. There was a single
sharp pain in her gut as the cyst contracted- drawing the
armor out twice in a single day wasn't what Urza had in
mind when he made the cyst, but she could do it five times,
at least, before the process failed. The not-quite-liquid
flowed beneath her clothes.

She stepped into the unanchored ambulator. It swirled
around her, not unlike the armor itself. By the time she'd
reached the middle, the black disk had shrunk to half its
size and risen to her waist. Xantcha had repressed how much
she disliked the ambulators. The sinking and suffocating
was worse than following Urza between-worlds, and the cyst
made the passage worse. It swelled in her gut; she thought
she might explode before her head emerged in Phyrexia.

Because she'd unanchored the prime end in the forest,
the nether end in Phyrexia was also loose and shrank as
Xantcha emerged. Any Phyrexian would have been suspicious
of a newt who rolled up a ambulator behind it. The avengers
that normally guarded the Fourth Sphere field, where scores
of ambulators were anchored, would have annihilated her on
sight, if there had been any left standing. Xantcha assumed
that Urza had annihilated them as he emerged; at least,
something had.

Waste not, want not, the Fourth Sphere was even uglier
than she remembered with acrid air and oily ash drizzling
from the soot clouds overhead. The roar of a thousand
furnaces was less a sound than a presence, a vise tightened
over her ribs. The hollow where the ambulator had been
anchored was bright with bilious yellows, noxious greens,
and an iridescent purple that was the very color of
disease. Nothing was alive, of course; it was just filthy
oil, slicked over an eon of detritus not fit for even the
furnaces.

There wasn't a living Phyrexian, newt or otherwise, in
sight.

Grateful, but suspicious of her good fortune, Xantcha
retrieved the glossy disk from beneath her feet: the
rolled-up ambulator. Holding it by its flexible rim, she
twisted her wrists in opposite directions. The disk rippled
and shrank until it was scarcely larger than her palm, with
the jewels protruding on both sides.

After tucking the ambulator between her belt and her
armor, Xantcha took her bearings. There was no sun-star for
Phyrexia, especially not here, in the Fourth Sphere. Away
from the furnaces, light came harsh, constant and without

shadows. But the place was home, or it had been, and it
came back to her.

A few strides up the greasy slope, the horizon expanded
and Xantcha saw why her return to Phyrexia had been so
easy: straight ahead, in the direction of the Fane of
Flesh, the soot clouds had turned red and fire fell from
the sky.

Urza? Xantcha asked herself and decided it was possible
that Urza was burning his way through Phyrexia. The
ambulators could be anchored anywhere. Once unrolled, they
were tunnels, direct passages from one specific place to
another, no detours allowed, but a 'walker made his own
path here, there and everywhere. Urza could change his mind
between-worlds, but whenever, wherever, he ended his 'walk,
he stood on a world's surface. In Phyrexia, the surface was
the First Sphere.

When she'd dwelt in Phyrexia, before she'd known the
meaning of silence, Xantcha had been able to ignore the
furnace roar. She reached within herself to remember the
trick and realized she'd been gone from Phyrexia several
times longer than she'd been a part of it. But the memory
was there. Xantcha numbed herself to the ambient rumbling
and heard the clanging alarms.

She smiled. Those alarms were struck when a furnace was
about to blow. Every Phyrexian had an emergency place, and
for newts that place was the Fane of Flesh, precisely where
she wanted to go. Of course, the emergency wasn't a
furnace, and the closer she got to the sprawled hulks of
furnaces, fanes, and gremlin shanties, the clearer it was
that in the absence of the expected disaster, panic had
replaced plan.

Priests and other compleated types that Xantcha didn't
remember, and possibly, had never seen, raced through
gremlin town. Their voices were shrill enough to hurt. The
challenge was staying out of their way; the shambles were
already littered with gremlins who'd failed.

Urza's armor protected Xantcha from the sky; her sense
of purpose did the rest. The Fane of Flesh wasn't the most
impressive structure in the Fourth Sphere, but it stood
near the glistening oil fountain, which had become a spire
of blue-white flame.

A phalanx of demons made their appearance while Xantcha
threaded her way through the maze of furnaces. Narrow beams
of amber and orange shot upward from their torsos, into the
reddest clouds. Urza answered with lightning. In the Fourth
Sphere's filthy skies, the air itself ignited and a web of
fire shot to every part of the horizon. Xantcha felt the
heat through her armor. Her instinct was to run, but ash
quickly followed the fire, and the Fourth Sphere went dark.

For a moment, flesh had the advantage over metal, at
least flesh protected by Urza's armor. Neither ash nor
smoke irritated Xantcha's eyes, and with a bit of effort
she could see a body's length in front of her. As in the
gremlin town alleys, the danger came from the panicked and
the fallen: no one paid any attention to a stray newt,
assuming they could see her.

Then the demons regrouped. A low humming sound began in
the distance, followed by a cold wind that scoured the air.
As it passed overhead, Xantcha looked up and saw the bottom
of the Third Sphere, a sight she'd never seen before. She

saw the flames, too, where Urza had burnt through the outer
spheres. Another few moments and Xantcha might have seen
Urza's dragon, if she hadn't started to run for the Fane.

The rusty doors on the far side of the Glistening
Fountain were wide open as Xantcha entered the plaza where
newts were compleated. She was in the final sprint for the
Fane, when a vast shadow moved overhead. The last time
Xantcha had seen Urza's new dragon, she hadn't noticed any
wing struts and had assumed the artifact had grown too
heavy for flight. She'd assumed incorrectly. Six of the
dragon's eight legs supported wings that dwarfed the rest
of its body and yet were highly flexible and maneuverable.
The dragon swooped sideways to avoid a demon-flung bolt
while belching a tongue of flame.

A furnace exploded. Metal shards and slag traced
brilliant arcs beneath the Third Sphere ceiling. Impressed
by beauty that was also terrifying and deadly, Xantcha
considered the possibility that Urza would win. Then a
tree-sized clot of slag crashed into the plaza. The flames
of the Glistening Fountain sputtered and died while yellow
fumes rose from the new crater beside it. Unless Xantcha
wanted to die with Phyrexia, she had to find her heart and
unroll the ambulator while there was still a solid place
left to support the prime end.

Xantcha finished her run with no further distractions.

"Down! Go down!" a jittery vat-priest insisted as soon
as she cleared the open doors. "Newts go down!" Its hooks
and paddles clattered against each other as it indicated a
deserted corridor.

The priests weren't flesh, but they weren't mindless
artifacts, either. They might lack sufficient imagination
to disobey a fatal command, but they had enough to be
afraid.

"I go," Xantcha replied, the first time she'd spoken
Phyrexian in centuries. She bungled the pronunciation; the
priest didn't seem to notice.

She'd forgotten how big the Fane was. Maybe she'd never
noticed; she'd never gone anywhere within it without a
cadre of other newts and priests surrounding her. One
corridor was as good as another when she had no idea where
her heart might be, and the one the vat-priest had pointed
toward was the broadest and best lit. She read the glyph
inscriptions on the walls, hoping they would provide a
clue, but they were only exhortations, lies, and empty
promises, like everything else in Phyrexia.

The Fane of Flesh was quieter, cleaner than anything
beyond its precincts. Its walls had, so far, resisted the
outside flames. But it had taken damage. Turning a corner,
Xantcha came upon a pile of rubble from a collapsed ceiling
and a defunct vat-priest crushed beneath it. She wrenched
one of the priest's long hooks from its shoulder socket and
kept going.

A teacher-priest waited at another corner. Its eyes
were flesh within a flat, bronze mask. They darted between
the hook, Xantcha's face, her boots and her belt. "Newt?"
it asked.

Xantcha had taken the hook as a weapon, but the priest
assumed it was part of her, that it and her leather
garments, were evidence that she'd begun her compleation.

"The hearts. Where are the hearts? I am sent to guard

the hearts."

Flesh eyes blinked stupidly. "Hearts? What matter the
hearts?"

"We are attacked; they are the future. I am sent to
guard them."

"Who sent you?" it asked after another moment's
hesitation.

"A demon," Xantcha replied. Small lies weren't worth
the effort of defending them. "Where are the hearts? "

The teacher-priest continued to blink. Xantcha feared
it didn't know where the hearts were stored, not a
confession one priest would want to make to another,
especially another under a demon's command. It asked,
"Which demon?" as thunder waves pummeled the Fane and rust
rained from the ceiling.

Xantcha had no time to wonder whether the strike was
for Urza or against him. Gix was dead, thrust through a
fumarole centuries ago. Still, any answer was better than
none.

"The Great Gix sent me."

Her bluff worked. The teacher-priest just needed a
name. It quaked as it gave her detailed directions to a
vault so far beneath the Fourth Sphere floor it might
actually have been on the Fifth. More blasts shook the
Fane. A stairway she was supposed to use was clogged with
debris and the scent of fire.

"I'll have to tell Urza that he's wrong," Xantcha
complained as she put her hand on the portal artifact
tucked beneath her belt. "I wouldn't be standing here,
waiting to die, if I didn't have some damn fool useless
imagination."

She could have gotten out. The corridor was wide enough
to unroll the portal. She'd be back in the forest. Safe. Or
not safe. Ambulators could only be rolled up from their
prime end. If she left the ambulator's prime end here in
the corridor and the Fane collapsed, the rubble might
follow her to the forest ... all of Phyrexia might follow
her.

Waste not, want not! I never thought of that.

When she used the ambulator to escape, it would be a
three-step process: first to the forest to anchor the
nether end, back to Phyrexia to loosen the prime, and then
another passage back to the forest. Timing had become even
more critical.

Xantcha looked around for an intact stairway. She found
one and found the vault, too. Measured by the world she'd
left, Xantcha guessed she'd spent a morning in Phyrexia.
Looking down at the mass of softly glowing hearts, she
guessed it might take a lifetime to find her own.

The Ineffable's plan for Phyrexia was precise, even
rigid, but the plan didn't cover every contingency. Vat-
priests dutifully brought newt hearts to the vault, then
simply heaved the little stones into a pit, one for every
newt ever decanted. At the surface the pit was about twice
the size of an unrolled ambulator. When she thrust the vatpriest's
hook into the chaos, it went in all the way to the
shoulder gears without striking anything solid.

The pit seethed. Countless glowing amber fists and a
smaller number of dark ones were vibrating constantly
against one another. On her knees, Xantcha could hear a

steady chorus of sighs and gasps. She wondered about the
dark ones and got lucky. She heard a pop! right in front of
her, then watched as a glowing heart brightened, then went
dark.

Death?

Phyrexians were dying in Urza's assault. Were their
hearts, long detached from their compleated bodies, going
dark as they did? Xantcha retrieved the newly darkened
stone with the vat-priest's hook. Tiny scratches marred its
surface: marks left as the heart stone clattered against
its companions or a record of errors made by the Ineffable?
She read the glyphs on the walls. They repeated the
familiar teacher-priest lies.