by Lynn Abbey
After sating himself on newtish thoughts and passions, Gix departed. The teacher-priests sought to reclaim their place above the cadre, but after the elegance and horror of a demon, they seemed puny. In time, they became afraid of their charges and kept their distance as the newts began to talk more freely among themselves, planning for their glorious futures on other worlds.
Xantcha maintained her place, eating, sleeping, laboring, and taking part in the discussions, but she was no longer like the other newts. That moment when she'd created two Xantchas in her mind had transformed her, as surely as the tender-priests reshaped newts in the Fane of Flesh. She was aware of herself as no one else-except Gixseemed to be. She stumbled into loneliness, and, seeking relief from that singular ache, she sought out the Xantcha whose hand she'd once held.
"I am without," she'd said, because at the time she hadn't known a better word. "I need to touch you."
She'd offered both hands, but the other Xantcha had reeled backward, screaming as if it were in terrible pain. The rest of the cadre swarmed between them, and Xantcha was lucky to survive.
Xantcha remembered the newt that had sawed off its arm
with the razor grass, but what she wanted was an end to her isolation, not an end of existence. She considered running away. The First Sphere was vast. A newt could easily lose herself beyond the shimmering horizon, but if she placed herself beyond her cadre and its priests, Xantcha would slowly starve, because despite their constant efforts with hoes and plows and sickles, nothing edible grew in First Sphere's soil. Except for the meaty sludge brought up from Fane of Flesh, there was nothing on Phyrexia's First Sphere that a newt could eat.
When the cadre closed ranks to keep her from the simmering cauldrons the priests brought from the Fane, Xantcha picked up a sickle and cleared a path to her place. Five newts went down with the cauldron for rendering; one priest, too. Xantcha went to sleep with a full stomach and the sense that she'd never reopen her eyes. But neither Gix nor the Ineffable came to claim her. Once again, it seemed that she hadn't made a mistake.
Others did ... newts began to disappear, a few at a time while they slept. Xantcha contrived to make a tiny hole in her box. She kept watch when she should have been asleep, but the Ineffable wasn't consuming newts. Instead, priests picked up a box here, a box there, and took them away. Speaker-equipped priests could spew words faster than soft-lipped newts; sometimes they forgot that newts heard faster than they spoke. Xantcha hid in a place on the edge and listened to chittering, metallic conversations.
The moment she and the others had been promised since their decanting had arrived. Newts were leaving Phyrexia. They were sleeping on another world. One of the priests had gone through the portal. It didn't like what it had found. Its coils had corroded and its joints had clogged because water, not oil, flowed everywhere: in fountains, across the land and in blinding torrents from the sky that was sometimes blue, sometimes black, sometimes speckled and sometimes streaked with fire. A worthless place, the priest said, rust and dust, fit only for newts.
Xantcha held her breath, as she'd held it before Gix. Although she'd never seen or felt it, she remembered water and knew in her bones that a place where water fell from the sky would be a place where a newt could get lost without necessarily starving. She began to make herself more useful, more visible, to the others, in hopes that the priests would pick her box, but though the disappearances continued, the priests didn't take her.
The cadre withered. Xantcha was certain she'd be taken away. There simply weren't that many left. Then the taking stopped. The newts slept and worked, slept and worked. Xantcha wasn't the only one who listened to the priests. None of them liked what they heard. There were problems in the other world. Newts had been exposed and destroyed.
Thirty centuries after the fact, when she and Urza returned to Dominaria, Xantcha had pieced together what might have happened. Appended to some of the oldest chronicles in her collection were accounts of strangers, undersized and eerily identical, who'd appeared suddenly and throughout what was left of Ter-isiare, some twenty years after the Brothers' War had ended. The Dominarians hadn't guessed what the strangers suddenly tromping through their fields were or where they'd come from, but ignorance
hadn't kept them from exterminating the nearly defenseless newts. But at the time, in Phyrexia, there'd been only whispers of disaster, thwarted destiny, and newts transformed to meat in a place where not even the Ineffable could find them.
The whispers reached Xantcha's cadre along with orders that they were to move. New cadres were coming, fresh from the Fane of Flesh. Xantcha caught sight of them as she dragged her box through the sharp, oily grass. The replacement cadres were composed of newts who were bigger than her. No two of the larger newts were quite the same and every one was obviously male or female.
Xantcha had lost her destiny. She and the rest of her depleted cadre became redundant. Even the tools with which they'd turned the sterile Phyrexian soil were taken away, and the food cauldrons, which had always arrived promptly between periods of work and sleep, sleep and work, appeared only before sleep ... if the cadre was lucky.
Luck. A word that went with despair. Denied their promised place, some newts crawled into their boxes and never came out again. Not Xantcha. As regarded luck, Gix was lucky that she didn't know where to find him or how to destroy him. It took time to grow a newt in the vats, and more time to teach it the most basic tasks, and transform it into a Phyrexian. So much time that the male and female newts she'd glimpsed farming her cadre's old place must have been already growing in the vats when the demon had planted his blue-green spark in her skull.
Oix had lied to her. It was a small thing compared to the other hardships she endured, now that her cadre was redundant, but it sustained her for a long time until another wave of rumors swept across the First Sphere. A knife had sliced through the passage that connected Phyrexia with the other world; it had broken and was beyond repair. Half of the larger newts were trapped on the wrong side; the rest were as redundant as she had become.
Without warning, as was usually the case in her Phyrexian life, all the redundant newts, including Xantcha, were summoned to the Fourth Sphere to witness the excoriation of the demon Gix. The Ineffable's plan for Phyrexian glory had been thwarted by the Knife and someone had to be punished. Gix's lustrous carapace was corroded and burnt before he was consigned to the Seventh Sphere for torment. It was a magnificent spectacle. Gix fought like the hellspawn he was, taking four fellow demons into the reeking fumarole with him. Their shrieks were momentarily louder than the roar of the crowds and furnaces, though they faded quickly.
For a while, Xantcha remained in the Fourth Sphere. She had no place, no assignment. In a place as tightly organized as Phyrexia, a place-less newt should have been noticeable, but Xantcha wasn't. She dwelt among the gremlins. Even in Phyrexia, time spent in gremlin town couldn't be called living, but gremlins were flesh. They had to eat, and Xantcha ate with them, as she learned things about flesh no compleat priest could teach her.
CHAPTER 4
Chaotic air currents rising above a patchwork of
cultivated fields seized Xantcha's sphere. For several panicked heartbeats, as she battled the provisions bouncing around inside the sphere, Xantcha didn't know where she was or why. After more than three thousand years, she needed that long to climb out of her memories.
The disorientation had passed before disaster could begin. Xantcha was in control before the sphere brushed the bank of a tree-shadowed stream. It collapsed around her, a warm, moist film that evaporated quickly, as it had countless times before, but thoughts of what might have happened left her gasping for air.
Xantcha hadn't intended to lose herself in her memories. The past, when there was so much of it crammed into a single mind, was a kind of madness. She dropped to her knees and wiped the film from her face before it had a chance to dry. Between coughs, Xantcha took her bearing from the horizons: sun sinking to the west, mountains to the
south, and gentle hills elsewhere. She'd come to her senses over inner Efuan Pincar, precisely the place she'd wanted to be. Luck, Xantcha told herself, and succumbed to another round of coughing.
Xantcha never liked to rely on luck, but just then, thoughts of luck were preferable to the alternatives. She'd been thinking of her beginnings, as she rarely did. Worse, she'd been thinking of Gix. She'd never forgotten that blue-green spark. Despite everything, she worried that the demon's mark might still be lurking somewhere within her skull.
She made herself think about Urza and all that they'd survived together. He could look inside her and destroy her if she became untrustworthy. So long as he didn't, Xantcha believed she could trust herself. But thoughts of Gix were no reason to fear Gix. Nothing escaped the excoriations of Phyrexia's Seventh Sphere. Even if the blue-green spark remained, the demon who'd drilled it into her was gone.
Urza insisted that she steer clear of Phyrexians, once she scented them. He didn't want his enemies to know where he was or that he'd returned to the land of his birth. They both knew that if she ever fell back into Phyrexian hands, they'd strip her memories before they consigned her to the Seventh Sphere, and she knew too many of Urza's secrets to justify the risk.
The Phyrexian presence on Dominaria had been growing over the past fifty years. Morvern and Baszerat were only two among a score of places where Xantcha had once scrounged regularly, but were-or soon would be-off limits. Efuan Pincar was not, however, among them. The little realm on the wrong side of the great island of Gulmany was so isolated and unimportant, that the rest of what had once been Terisiare scarcely acknowledged its existence. It was the last place Xantcha expected to scent a Phyrexian. If she'd succumbed to thoughts of Gix while soaring over Efuan Pincar, it wasn't because a Phyrexian had tickled her mind, but because she'd begun to doubt Urza.
True, he'd go to the places where she'd scented sleepers, and he'd find them, but he wouldn't do anything about them. Newts disguised as born-folk weren't enough to goad Urza into action. Xantcha thought it would take death for that. She'd been perversely pleased when she'd found a war in Baszerat and Morvern. She thought for sure that
would overcome Urza's obsession with the past, and perhaps it had; he'd never come so close to striking her.
Kayla Bin-Kroog hadn't mentioned Efuan Pincar in her epic. Efuand chroniclers explained that omission by proclaiming that their land had been empty until three hundred years ago, when a handful of boats had brought a band of refugees to Gulmany's back side. Xantcha doubted that there'd ever been enough boats in Terisiare to account for all the living Efuands, but scribes lied, she knew that from her Antiquity Wars collection. What mattered to Xantcha was that among any ten men of Efuan Pincar, at least one matched Kayla's word picture of Mishra, and another had his impulsive temperament. To find better odds she'd have to soar across the Sea of Laments, something she'd done just once, by mistake, and had sworn she'd never try again.
Xantcha knew her plan to bring Urza face to face with a dark, edgy youth who might remind him of his long-dead brother, wasn't the most imaginative strategy, but she was Phyrexian, and as Urza never ceased telling her, Phyrexians lacked imagination. Urza himself was a genius, a man of great power and limitless imagination, when he chose to exercise it. Once she had him face-to-face with her false Mishra, Xantcha expected Urza's imagination would repair any defects in her clumsy Phyrexian strategy.
Then Xantcha caught herself thinking about other notoriously failed strategies: Gix and thousands of identical sexless newts.
"What if I'm wrong?" she asked the setting sun; the same question that Urza asked whenever she tried to prod him into action.
The sun didn't answer, so Xantcha gave herself the same answer she gave Urza, "Dominaria's doomed if Urza does nothing. If he thinks his brother's come back to him, he might do something, and something-anything-is better than nothing."
Xantcha watched the last fiery sliver of sunlight vanish in the west. Her sphere had dried into a fine white powder that disappeared in the breeze. By her best guess, she'd been aloft without food, water, or restful sleep for two and a half days. There was water in the stream and more than enough food in her shoulder sack, but sleep proved elusive. Wrapped in her cloak, Xantcha saw
Gix's toothsome face each time she closed her eyes. After watching the stars slide across the sky, she yawned out another sphere as the eastern horizon began to brighten.
* * *
Xantcha hadn't thought she'd find her Mishra in the first village she visited. Though experience on other worlds had convinced her that every village harbored at least one youth with more ambition than sense, it had stood to reason that she might need to visit several villages before she found the right combination of temperament and appearance. But temperament and appearance weren't her problems.
In the twenty years since her last visit, war and famine had come to Efuan Pincar. The cultivated field in
which she'd spent her first sleepless night had proved the exception to the new rules. The first village that Xantcha approached was still smoldering. The second had trees growing from abandoned hearths. Those villages that remained intact did so behind palisades of stone, brick, and sharpened stakes.
She approached the closed gates warily, regretting that she'd disguised herself as a cocky and aristocratic youth. It was an easy charade, one that matched her temperament and appearance, but throughout their wandering, she and Urza had come across very few wars that couldn't be blamed on aristocratic greed or pride.
The war in Efuan Pincar, however, proved to one of the rare exceptions. The gates swung open before she announced herself. The whole village greeted her with pleading eyes. They'd made assumptions: She was a young man who'd lost his horse and companions to the enemy. She needed their help. But most of all, they assumed she'd come to help them. Outnumbered and curious, Xantcha made her own assumption. She'd learn more if she let them believe what they wanted to believe.
"You will go to Pincar City and tell Tabarna what is happening?" the village spokesman asked, once he had offered her food and drink. "We are all too old to make the journey."
"Tabarna does not know," another elder said, and all the villagers bobbed their heads in agreement.
"He cannot know. If Tabarna knew, he would come to us. If he knew, he would help us. He would not let us suffer." A multitude of voices, all saying the same thing.
A man named Tabarna had governed Efuan Pincar twenty years ago. Part priest, part prince, he'd been an able ruler. If the villagers' Tabarna were still the man Xantcha remembered, though, he'd be well past his prime, and beloved or not, someone would be taking advantage of him. Usually, that someone would be a man dressed as she was dressed, in fine clothes and with a good steel sword slung below his hip. Xantcha couldn't ask too many questions, not without compromising her disguise, but she promised to deliver the villagers' message. Red-Stripes and Shratta were terrorizing the countryside.
The village offered to give her a swaybacked horse for her journey. Xantcha bought it instead with a worn silver coin and left the next day, before her debts grew any higher. The elders apologized that they couldn't offer her the escort a young nobleman deserved, but all their young men were gone, swept up by one side or the other.
As she rode away, Xantcha couldn't guess how the Shratta had gotten involved in a war. Twenty years ago, the Shratta had been a harmless sect of ascetics and fools. They preached that anyone who did not live by the two hundred and fifty-six rules in Avohir's holy book was damned, but no one had taken them seriously. She had no idea who or what the Red-Stripes were until she'd visited a few more villages. The Red-Stripes had begun as royal mercenaries, charged with the protection of the palaces and temples that the suddenly militant Shratta had begun threatening, some fifteen years ago.
Oddly enough, in none of the tales Xantcha listened to did she hear of the two groups confronting each other.
Instead, they roamed the countryside, searching out each others' partisans, m
aking accusations when nothing could be proved, then killing the accused and burning their homes.
"The Shratta," a weary villager explained, "tell us they are the wrath of Avohir and they punish us if we do not live closely by Avohir's holy book. Then, after the Shratta have finished with us, the Red-Stripes come. They see that the Shratta didn't take everything, so they take what's left."
"Every spring, it begins again," one of the old women added. "Soon there will be nothing left."
"Twice we sent men to Tabarna, twice they did not come back. We have no men left."
Then, as in the other villages, the survivors asked Xantcha to carry their despair to Tabarna's ear. She nodded, accepted their food, and left on her swaybacked horse, knowing that there was nothing she could do. Her path would not take her to Pincar City, Tabarna's north coast capital. She'd begun to doubt that it would take her to a suitable Mishra either. With or without pitched battles, Efuan Pincar had been at war for nearly a decade, and young men were in short supply.
Xantcha's path-a rutted dirt trail because her sphere wouldn't accommodate a horse-took her toward Medran, a market town. A brace of gate guards greeted her with hands on their sword hilts and contempt in their eyes: Where had she been? How did a noble lad with fine boots and a sword come to be riding a swaybacked nag?
Xantcha noticed that their tunics were hemmed with a stripe of bright red wool. She told them how she'd ridden into the countryside with older, more experienced relatives. They'd been beset by the Shratta, and she was the sole survivor, headed back to Pincar City.
"On a better horse, if there's one to be found."
Xantcha sniffed loudly; when it came to contempt, she'd learned all the tricks before the first boatload of refugees struck the Efuan Pincar shore. She'd also yawned out her armor before she'd ridden up to the gate. The Red- Stripes were in for a surprise if they drew their swords against her.