Planeswalker (12 page)

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."

"Wake up!"

Words and jostling ended Xantcha's sleep so thoroughly
that for a heartbeat she neither knew where she was nor
what she'd been dreaming. In short order she recognized Rat
and the streamside grove where she'd fallen asleep, both
awash in morning light, but the dreams remained lost. She
hadn't intended to fall deeply asleep and was angry with
herself for that error and surprised to find Rat clinging
to her forearm.

He retreated when she glowered.

"You had a nightmare."

Images shook out of Xantcha's memory: the damp world of
insect artifacts, her last beating at Phyrexian hands, Urza
hurling fire and sorcery to rescue her. Those were moments
of her life that Xantcha would rather not dream about.
Between them and anger, she was in a sour mood.

"You didn't take advantage?" she demanded.

Rat answered, "I considered it," without hesitation.
"All night I considered it, but I'm a long way from
anywhere, I've got a chain between my feet, and even though
you may be stronger than me and have that thing that makes
us fly, you're still a boy. You need someone to take care
of you."

"Me? I need someone to take care of me?" Of all the
reasons she could think of to find herself in possession of
a slave, that was the last she'd expected. "What about your
word?"

He shrugged. "I've had a night to think about it. When
I woke up ... at first I thought you were pretending to be
asleep, waiting for me to run. But if I were going to run-
walk-" Rat rattled the chain. "I'd have to make sure you
couldn't catch me again."

"What were you going to do? Strangle me? Bash my head?"

Another shrug. "I didn't get that far. You started
having your nightmare. It looked like a bad one, so I woke
you-you don't believe that Shratta nonsense about dreams
and your soul?"

"No." Xantcha knew little about the Shratta's beliefs,
except that they were violently intolerant of everyone
else's. Besides, Urza had said she'd lost her soul in the
vats.

"Then why are you so cross-grained? I'm still here, and
you're not dreaming a miserable dream."

Xantcha stretched herself upright. Assor's basket was
where she'd left it, exactly as she left it, not a crumb
unaccounted for. She separated another meal and tossed Rat
a warning along with his bread.

"I don't need anyone taking care of me. Don't want it
either. When we get to the cottage, your name becomes
Mishra, and Urza's the one who needs your help."

Rat grunted. Xantcha expected something more, but it
seemed that he'd discovered the virtues of silence and
obedience, at least until she told him to sit beside her.

"There's no other way?" he asked, turning pale. "Can't
we walk? Even with the chain, I'd rather walk."

Xantcha shook her head and Rat bolted for the bushes.
After trying unsuccessfully to turn himself inside out and
wasting his breakfast, Rat crawled back to her side.

"I'm ready now."

"I've never fallen from the sky, Rat. Never come close.
You're safer than you'd be in a wagon or walking on your

own two feet."

"Can't help it-" Rat began then froze completely as
Xantcha yawned and the sphere spread from her open mouth.

He started for the bushes again. Knowing that his gut
was empty and that she'd be the one who'd be vomiting if
she had to bite off the sphere before it was finished,
Xantcha grabbed the back of Rat's neck and held his head in
her lap until the sphere was rising.

"The worst is over. Sit up. Don't think so much.
There's always something to see. Watch the clouds, the
ground."

Ground was the wrong word. Cursing feebly, Rat clung to
her for dear life. If he couldn't relax, it was going to be
a painful journey for both of them. Xantcha tried sympathy.

"Talk to me, Rat. Tell me why you're so afraid. Put
your fears into words."

But he couldn't be reassured, so Xantcha tried a less
gentle approach. Freeing one arm, she set the sphere
tumbling, then yelled louder than his moans:

"I said, talk to me, Rat. You're giving in to fear,
Rat." She thought of her feet touching ground, and the
sphere plummeted; she thought of playing among the clouds
and the sphere rebounded at a truly dizzying speed. "You
haven't begun to know fear. Now, talk to me! Why are you
afraid?"

Rat screamed, "It's wrong! It's all wrong. I can feel
the sky watching me, waiting. Waiting for a chance to throw
me down!"

He was sobbing, but his death grip loosened as soon as
the words were out of his mouth.

Xantcha diumped Rat soundly between the shoulders. "I
won't let the sky have you."

"Doesn't matter. It knows I'm here. Knows I don't
belong. It's waiting."

She thumped him again. Rat's complaint was too much
like her own in the early days, when Urza would drag her
between-worlds. Urza had the planeswalker spark; the
fathomless stuff between the multiverse's countless world-
planes bent to his will. Xantcha had been, and remained, an
unwelcome interloper. The instant the between-worlds furled
around her, she could hear the vast multi-verse sucking its
breath, preparing to spit her out.

The planeswalker spark was something a mind either had,
or didn't have. Xantcha didn't have it; Urza couldn't share
his. The cyst was the only stopgap that he'd been able to
devise. It didn't leave Xantcha feeling any less like an
interloper, but it did give promise that she'd be alive
when the multiverse spat her out. She'd ask Urza to implant
a cyst in Rat's belly-in Mishra's belly-but until then,
there was nothing she could do except keep him talking.

The sky above Efuan Pincar wasn't nearly as hostile as
the between-worlds. There was a chance he'd talk himself
out of his fears. She nudged him into another telling of
his life story. The details differed from the second tale
he'd told in Assor's wagon, but the overall spirit hadn't
changed. When he came to the part where he'd found
religious denunciations written in blood on the walls of
his family's home, the intensity of his feelings forced Rat
to sit straight and speak in a firm, steady voice.

"If the Shratta are men of Avohir, then I spit on

Avohir. Better to be damned than live in the Shratta's
fist."

That was the sort of fatal, futile sentiment that
Xantcha understood, but she was less pleased to hear Rat
declare, "When your Urza's done with me, I'll make my way
to Pincar City and join the Red-Stripes. They've got the
right idea: kill the Shratta. There's no other way. They'd
sooner die than admit they're wrong, so let them die."

"There are Phyrexians among the Red-Stripes," Xantcha
warned. "They're a much worse enemy than any Shratta."

"They're not my enemy, not if they're fighting the
Shratta."

"Mishra may have thought the same thing, but it is not
so simple. Flesh cannot trust them, because Phyrexia will
never see flesh as anything but a mistake to be erased."

Rat watched her quietly.

"Flesh. We're flesh, you and I," Xantcha pinched the
skin on her arm, "but Phyrexians aren't. They're artifacts.
Like Urza's, during the Brothers' War ... only,
Phyrexians aren't artifacts. Their flesh has been replaced
with other things, mostly metal, according to the
Ineffable's plan. Their blood's been replaced with
glistening oil. So it should be. Blood cannot trust
Phyrexians because blood is a mistake."

His eyes had narrowed. They studied a place far beyond

Xantcha's shoulder. Urza talked about thinking, but he
rarely did it. Urza either solved his problems instantly,
without thinking, or he sank in the mire of obsession. Rat
was changing his mind while he thought. Xantcha found the
process unnerving to watch.

She spoke quickly, to conceal her own discomfort.
"Flesh, blood, meat-what does it matter? Phyrexia is your
enemy, Rat. The Brothers' War was just the beginning of
what Phyrexia will do to all of Dominaria, if it can. There
are Phyrexians in the Red-Stripes, and you'd be wiser, far
wiser, to join the Shratta in the fight against them."

"It's just ..." Rat was thinking even as he talked.
His mind changed again and he met Xantcha's eyes with an
almost physical force. "You said you smelled Phyrexians
among the Red-Stripes. My nose is as good as my eyes, and I
didn't smell anything at all. You said 'flesh cannot trust
them,' but everybody was flesh, even Tucktah and Garve. On
top of all, your talk about me pretending to be Mishra, for
someone you call Urza. Something's not true, here."

"Do you think I'm lying?" Xantcha was genuinely
curious.

"Whatever you smelled back in Medran, it scared you,
because it was Phyrexian, not because it was Red-Stripe.
So, I guess you're telling the truth, just not all of it.
Maybe we're both flesh, Xantcha, but, Avohir's truth,
you're not my sort of flesh."

"I bleed," Xantcha asserted, and to prove the point
drew the knife from her boot and slashed a fingertip.

It was a deep cut, deeper than she'd intended. Bright
blood flowed in a steady stream from finger to palm, from
palm over wrist, where it began to stain her sleeve.

Rat grimaced. "That wasn't necessary," he said,
pointedly look-ing beyond the sphere; the first time he'd
done that. Eventually a person would face his fears,
provided the alternatives were worse. "You'd know where to

cut yourself."

Xantcha held the knife hilt where Rat would see it. He
turned further away.

"You were thinking murder not long ago," she reminded
him. "Bashing me so you could escape."

Rat shook his head. "Not even close. When my family
left

Pincar City ... My father learned to slaughter and
butcher meat each fall, but I never could. I always ran
away, even last year."

He shrank a little, as if he'd lost a bit of himself by
the admission. Xantcha returned the knife to her boot.

"You believe me?" she asked before sticking her bloody
finger in her mouth.

"I can't believe you, even if you're telling the truth.
Urza the Artificer. Mishra. Smelling Phyrexians. This ...
this thing-" He flung his hand to the side, struck the
sphere, and recoiled. "You're too strange. You look like a
boy, but you talk ... You don't talk like anyone I've
ever heard before, Xantcha. It's not that you sound
foreign, but you're not Efuand. You say you're not an
artifact and not Phyrexian. I don't know what to believe.
Whose side are you on?"

"Urza's side ... against Phyrexia." Her finger hadn't
stopped bleeding; she put it back in her mouth.

"Urza's no hero, not to me. What he did thirty-four
hundred years ago, his gods should still be punishing him
for that. You throw a lot of choices in front of me, all of
them bad, one way or another. I don't know what to think."

"You think too much."

"Yeah, I hear that all the time... ." Rat's voice
trailed off. Whoever had chided him last had probably been
killed by the Shratta. All the time had become history for
him, history and grief.

Xantcha left him alone. Her finger was pale and
wrinkled. At least it had stopped bleeding. They'd been
soaring due west in the grasp of a gentle, drifting wind.
Clouds were forming to the north. So far the clouds were
scattered, fluffy and white, but north of Efuan Pincar was
the Endless Sea where huge storms were common and sudden.
Xantcha used her hands to put the sphere on a southwesterly
course and set it rising in search of stronger winds.

Belatedly, she realized she had Rat's undivided
attention.

"How do you do that?" he asked. "Magic? Are you a
sorcerer? Would that explain everything?"

"No."

"No?"

"No, I don't know how I do it. I don't know how I walk,
either, or how the food I eat keeps me alive, but it does.
One day, Urza handed me something. He said it was a cyst,
and he said, swallow it. Since it came from Urza, it was
probably an artifact. I don't know for sure because I never
asked. I know how to use it. I don't need to know more, and
neither will you."

"Sorry I asked. I'm just trying to think my way through
this." "You think too much."

She hadn't meant to repeat the comment that had jabbed
his memory, but before she could berate herself, Rat shot
back: "I'm supposed to be Mishra, aren't I?"

He'd changed his mind again. It was possible that a
man, a true flesh-and-blood man, not like Urza, couldn't
think too much.

The sphere found the stronger winds and slewed
sideways. Xantcha needed full concentration to stop the
tumbling. Rat curled up against her with his head between
his knees. To the north, clouds billowed as she watched. It
was unlikely that they could outrun the brewing storm, but
they could cover a lot of territory before she had to get
them to shelter. There would, however, be a price.

"It's going to be fast and a little bumpy while we run
the wind-stream. You ready?"

Taking Rat's groan for assent, Xantcha angled her hand
west of southwest, and the sphere leapt as if it had been
shot from a giant's bow. If she'd been alone, Xantcha would
have pressed both hands against the sphere's inner curve
and let the wind roar past her face. She figured Rat wasn't
ready for such exhilaration and kept her guiding hand
sheltered in her lap. The northern horizon became a white
mountain range whose highest peaks were beginning to spread
and flatten against an invisible ceiling.

"Somebody's going to get wild weather tonight," Xantcha
said to her unresponsive companion. "Maybe not us, but
someone's going to be begging Avohir's mercy."

She guided the sphere higher. Beneath them, the ground
resembled one of Urza's tabletops, though flatter and
emptier: a few roads, like rusty wire through spring-green
fields, a palisaded village of about ten homesteads tucked
in a stream bend. Xantcha considered her promise to replace
Rat's rags and, implicitly, to have his fetters removed.