Planeswalker

by Lynn Abbey

  "Don't even think about trying to escape," Xantcha warned.

  Weight wasn't a problem. Xantcha could have carried a barrel of iron or lead back to the cottage. Size was another matter. The sphere grew until it was wide as her outstretched arms. Then it stiffened and began to rise. Rat panicked. The sphere lurched and shot up like an arrow, throwing them against each other, the basket, and the scabbard slung at Xantcha's side.

  There were too many things competing for Xantcha's attention. She eliminated the largest distraction by punching it in the gut. They were less than a man's height over the ground when she got everything steadied. Rat breathed noisily through his wide-open mouth, even after they'd begun to soar gently westward. He'd pressed himself against the bubble. His arms were sprawled, and his palms were flat against the sphere's inner curve. Nothing moved except his fingers, which clawed silently, compulsively: a cat steadying itself on glass.

  Xantcha tried to sort out the tangle of legs, cloak, and overturned basket at the bottom of the sphere, but her least move pushed her companion toward panic. A nearly full moon showed faintly above the eastern horizon; she'd planned to soar through well into the night. That would have been unspeakably cruel, and though she was tempted-her forearms ached where the slave-goad's sorcery had surrounded them-she resisted the temptation.

  The sphere swung like a falling leaf in the cooling night air- a pleasant, even relaxing movement for Xantcha, but sheer torture for Rat, who'd begun to pray between gasps. Xantcha guided them slowly to the ground near a twisting line of trees.

  She warned him, "Put your hands over your face now. The sphere's skin will collapse against you when it touches the ground. It vanishes more quickly than cobwebs in a flame, but for that moment when it covers your mouth and nose, you'll think you're suffocating."

  Rat moaned, which Xantcha took as a sign that he'd heard and understood, but he didn't take her advice. He clawed himself as he'd clawed the sphere. There were bloody streaks across his face before he calmed down.

  "There's a stream through the trees. Wash yourself. Drink. You'll feel better afterward." Xantcha stood over him, offering an arm up, which, predictably, he refused. She gave him a clear path to the stream and another warning: "Don't think about running." He was gone a long time. Xantcha might have worried that he'd thrown himself in if she hadn't been able to hear him heaving his guts out. She'd kindled a small fire before he returned- not something she usually did, but born-folk often found solace in the random patterns of flames against darkness. Rat was

  shivering and damp from the waist up when he returned.

  "You need clothes. Tomorrow, I'll keep an eye out for another town. Until then-" she offered her cloak.

  It might have been poison or sorcery by the way Rat stared at it, and he shrank a little when he finally took it.

  "Can you eat? You should try to eat. It's been a hard day for you. The bread's good and this other stuff-" she held up a long, hollow tube. "Looks like parchment, tastes like apricots."

  Another hesitation, but by the way he tore off and chewed through a finger's length of the tube, Xantcha guessed the sticky stuff might once have been one of his favorite treats.

  "There's more," she assured him, hoping food might be a bridge to peace between them.

  Rat set the apricot leather aside. "Who are you? What are you? The truth this time-like Assor said. Why me? Why did you buy me?" He took a deep breath. "Not that it matters. I've been as good as dead since the Shratta came."

  "I must be a lousy liar, Rat, because I haven't lied to you. I'm Xantcha. I need you because Urza needs to talk to his brother, and when I saw you among the other slaves outside the tavern, I saw Mishra."

  Rat stared at the flames. "Urra. Urza. You keep saying Urza. Do you mean the Urza? Urza the Artificer? The one who was born three thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven years ago? Avohir's sweet mercy, Xantcha, Urza's a legend. Even if he survived the sylex, he's been dead for thousands of years."

  "Maybe Urza is a legend, but he's certainly not dead. The sylex turned the Weakstone and the Mightstone into his eyes; don't look too closely at them when you meet him."

  "Thanks, I guess, for the warning, but I can't believe you. And if I could, it would only make it worse. If there were an Urza still alive he'd kill me once for reminding him of his brother and again because I'm not Mishra. I'm no great artificer, no great sorcerer, no great warrior. Sweet Avohir, I can't even fight you. The way you overpowered me and broke Tucktah's goad ... and that sphere. That I don't understand at all. What are you, anyway? I mean, there are still artificers-not as good as Urza was supposed to have been, and not in Efuan Pincar, but Xantcha, that's not an Efuand name. Are you an artifact?"

  Of all the questions Rat might have asked, his last was one for which Xantcha had no ready answer. "I was neither made nor born. Urza found me, and I have stayed with him because he is ..." She couldn't finish that thought but offered another instead: "Urza blames himself for his brother's death, the guilt still eats at his heart. He won't fight you, Rat."

  They both shivered, though the air was calm and warm around the little fire.

  Rat spoke first, softly. "I'd always thought the one good thing that came out of that war was that the brothers finally killed each other. If they hadn't, it never would have ended."

  "It was the wrong war, Rat. They shouldn't have fought each other. There was another enemy, the Phyrexians-"

  "Phyrexians? I've heard of them. Living artifacts or

  some such. Nasty beasts, but slow and stupid, too. Jarsyl wrote about them, after the war."

  Rat knew his history, as much of it as had been written down, errors and all. "They were there at the end of the war, maybe at the beginning-that's what Urza believes. They killed Mishra and turned him into one of their own; what Urza fought was a Phyrex-ian. He thinks if he'd known soon enough, he could have saved his brother and together they could have fought the Phyrexians."

  "So the man you call Urza thinks that he could have stopped the war." Rat stared at Xantcha across the fire. "What do you think?"

  He had Mishra's quick wit and perception.

  "The Phyrexians are back, Rat, and they're not slow or stupid. They're right here in Efuan Pincar. I could smell them in Medran. Urza's got the power to fight them, but he won't do anything until he's settled his guilt with Mishra."

  Rat swore and stared at the stars. "These Phyrexians . . . Tuck-tah and Garve?"

  "No, not them. They were with the Red-Stripes. I smelled them."

  He swore a second time. "I'd've been better off staying where I was."

  CHAPTER 6

  They didn't talk much after that. Xantcha let the fire burn down, and Rat made no attempt to revive it, choosing instead to pull his borrowed cloak tight around his shoulders. As little as he seemed to want to talk, Rat seemed reluctant to give his body the rest it needed. Three times Xantcha watched him slump sideways only to jolt himself upright. Exhaustion won the fourth battle. His chin touched his chest, and his whole body curled forward. He'd find himself in a world of pain when he woke up.

  Xantcha touched Rat's arm gently and when that failed to rouse him, eased him to the ground, which was dry and no worse than wherever he might have slept last. He pulled his arms tight against his chest. Xantcha tried to straighten them but met resistance. His fists and jaw remained clenched even in sleep.

  She'd thought that kind of tension was unique to Urza, to Urza's madness, but perhaps Rat's conscience was equally guilt-wracked. Whatever lies he'd told her and Assor, he'd been through hard times. His stained and aromatic clothes had once been sturdy garments, cut and sewn so carefully that their seams still held. Not slave's clothing, no more than his shoes were a slave's shoes. They were missing their buckles and had been shredded where the fetters rubbed against them.

  If Xantcha were wiser in the ways of mortal misfortune, she might have read Rat's true history in the moonlight. Xantcha knew more about the unusual aspects of a hundred out-of-the-way worlds
than she knew about ordinary life anywhere. The two and a half centuries she and Urza had spent in Dominaria was the most time she'd spent in any single place, and though she'd taught herself to read and traveled at every opportunity, all she'd really learned was the extent of her ignorance.

  Xantcha's day hadn't been so exhausting as Rat's. She could have stayed awake all night and perhaps tomorrow night, if there'd been any need. But the night was calm, and although Rat's plight proved that there were slavers loose in Efuan Pincar, tonight they were in empty country, far from towns or villages. Xantcha heard owls and other night birds. Earlier she'd heard a wild cat yowling, but nothing large, nothing to keep her from settling down near Rat's feet, one arm touching his chain so she'd know if he moved unwisely during the night.

  Were their positions reversed, Xantcha wouldn't have tried to escape. In her long experience, the unknown had never proven more hospitable than the known. She hadn't thought of escape in all the time she was a newt among Phyrexians, although that, she supposed, had been different. A better comparison might be her first encounter with Urza... .

  * * *

  After Gix's excoriation, Xantcha had hidden among the Fourth Sphere gremlins, but they'd eventually betrayed her to the Fane of Flesh. The teacher-priests caught her and punished her and then sent her to the furnaces. Xantcha worked beside metal-sheathed stokers. The hot, acrid air had burned her lungs. She'd staggered under the impossible burdens they piled on her back. It was no secret, the remains of Gix's newts were to be used up as quickly as possible, but when Xantcha's strength gave out, it was a burnished stoker who stumbled over her fallen body and plunged into a crucible of molten brass.

  The fire-priests wouldn't have her after that, so the Fane sent Xantcha to the arena, where Phyrexian warriors honed their skills against engines and artifacts made in Phyrexia or creatures imported from other worlds. She was assigned tasks no warrior would have dared: feeding the creatures, repairing damaged engines, and destroying those artifacts the warriors had merely damaged. Her death had been expected, even anticipated, but when the fearsome wyverns with their fiery eyes and razor claws went on a rampage that reduced a hundred priests and warriors to oil- caked rubble, Xantcha the newt had survived without a scratch.

  Since she wouldn't die and they'd failed to kill her, the planner-priests decided that Xantcha had the makings of a dodger.

  Before he'd closed his eyes in sleep, the Ineffable had decreed that Phyrexia must be relentless in its exploration of other worlds and in the exploitation of whatever useful materials, methods and artifacts that exploration uncovered. Exploration was the easy part. A compleat Phyrexian, sheathed in metal and bathed in glistening oil, was thorough and precise. It was incapable of boredom and, when ordered to examine everything, it did exactly that, as accurate at the end as it had been in the beginning.

  But confronted with something they'd never seen before, lesser Phyrexians often became confused, and through their rough bumbling they frequently destroyed not only themselves but whatever they'd been examining as well. It was an intolerable situation and necessitated an unpleasant

  solution. Whole colonies of gremlins were endured, even nurtured, for their canniness and spontaneity, but no gremlin was cannier than the remnants of Gix's newts; the ones that refused to die.

  There were twenty of them summoned to the fountain, as identical as ever. They couldn't drink the glistening oil, so they were bathed in it while rows and ranks of compleat Phyrexians watched in silence. A mobile planner-priest described their new destiny:

  Go forth with the diggers and the bearers. Gaze upon the creations of born minds. Decipher their secrets so that they may be exploited safely for the glory and dominion of Phyrexia.

  There'd been more. Compleat Phyrexians never suffered from fatigue during an endless oration. They had no tongues to turn thick or pasty from overuse. And, of course, they lacked imagination. Never mind that Urza ridiculed Xantcha's imagination; she had more than the rest of Phyrexia rolled together. Standing beside the fountain, slick with glistening oil, Xantcha had imagined a wondrous future.

  Her future began on a world whose name she had never known. Perhaps the searcher-priests had known its name when they came to investigate it, but once they discovered something useful to Phyrexia, the name of the place where they'd found it was of little importance to the team of diggers, bearers, and dodgers sent to exploit the discovery.

  Once the ambulator portals were configured, it didn't matter where a world truly lay. Just one step forward into the glassy black disk the searcher-priests unrolled across the ground and whoosh, the team was where it needed to be. When the team finished its work-usually an excavation and extraction-they'd pack everything up, stride into the ambulator's nether end (identical to the prime end, except that it lacked the small configuration panel) and whoosh, they were back where they started, waiting for the next assignment.

  The ambulators were horrible artifacts: suffocating, freezing, and endless, and a dodger's work was worse than cleaning up after the warriors. The chief digger would lead a newt, and a gremlin or two to whatever artifact had roused the searcher-priests' attention, then sit back at a safe distance while dodgers did the dangerous work. Much of what the teams excavated was abandoned weapons, frequently still primed and hair-triggered; the rest, while not intended as weapons, still had a tendency to explode.

  Xantcha quickly realized that gremlins weren't any more imaginative than Phyrexians. They were simply more expendable. That very first time outside the nether end of an ambulator, when she saw blue-gray gremlin hands reaching for the shiniest lever in sight, Xantcha had decided she'd work alone and thrust her knife through the gremlin's throat before his imagination got her killed. The diggers hadn't cared. They only cared that she found and disconnected the tiny wires between that lever and a throbbing crimson crystal deep within the artifact.

  After the bearers got the inert crystal back to Phyrexia, a herald had conducted Xantcha to one of the great obsidian Fanes of the First Sphere, where the

  planner-priests-second only to the demons in Phyrexia's complex hierarchy-interrogated her about the excavation and the insights that had inspired her as she disconnected the wires. They demanded that she attach the crystal to the immense body of one of the planners. Which Xantcha did, having no other alternative to obedience. No one was more surprised than Xantcha herself when both she and the planner survived.

  The herald gave her a cloak of golden mesh and a featureless mask before conducting her back to the Fourth Sphere. For the first time, Xantcha looked like a compleat Phyrexian-provided she stood still.

  Diggers and bearers had been compleated with scrap: bits of brass, copper, and tin. Their leather-patched joints leaked oil with every move. They were not pleased to have a gold-clad newt in their midst. Her life had never been gentle, but everything Xantcha had endured until then had derived from indifference. It wasn't until she'd been rewarded by the planners that she experienced personal hatred and cruelty.

  * * *

  Beneath Xantcha's arm, the iron chain shifted slightly. Her fingers clamped over the shifting links before her eyes were open, but the movement was merely Rat shifting in his sleep. A blanket of clouds had unfurled between them and the moon. The land had gone quiet; Xantcha sniffed for storms or worse and found the air as empty as before. She loosened her grip on the chain without releasing it completely.

  Rat would run. Though he remained fettered and had no hope of survival in the open country, he'd try to run as long as he believed freedom lay somewhere else.

  There was no word for freedom in Phyrexian. The only freedom a Phyrexian knew was the effortless movement of metal against metal when each piece was cushioned in glistening oil, and even that freedom was inaccessible to a flesh-bound newt. Battered and starved by the diggers who depended on her for their own survival, Xantcha had taken refuge in endurance. Though none of the worlds she'd visited matched the moist, green world of her dreams-in truth, Dominaria itself did
n't match those dreams-the worst of them had been more hospitable than Phyrexia.

  And if perversity were a proper measure of accomplishment, then Xantcha took perverse pride in surmounting the challenge she found at the nether end of each ambulator portal. Once an artifact lay exposed in front of her, she'd forget the diggers' prejudice, the bearers' brutality. Every artifact was different, yet they were all the same, too, and if Xantcha studied them long enough-whether they'd been made by Urza, Phyrexia, or some nameless artificer on a nameless world-she'd eventually unravel their secrets.

  Xantcha would never be truly compleat, but she had achieved usefulness. She'd become a dodger, the fifth dodger, by virtue of the crimson sphere, which began a revolution in the way Phyrexia powered its largest non- sentient artifacts. A few more finds and she'd become the second dodger, Orman'huzra, though in her thoughts she

  remained Xantcha. The teacher-priests were right about some things: Oix's newts were too old, too set to change.

  There was no Phyrexian word for happiness, and contentment meant glistening oil, yet as Orman'huzra, Xantcha found a measure of both. The others might despise her, but with her gold-mesh cloak she was untouchable. And they needed her. Within their carapaces, Phyrexians were alive; they understood death and feared it more than a newt did because without flesh, compleat Phyrexians could not heal themselves, and scrap-made Phyrexians were almost as expendable as newts.

  The next turning point in Xantcha's life came in the windswept mountains of a world with three small moons. The artifact was huge and ringed by the rotting flesh of the born-folk who'd died defending it. Countless hollow crystals, no two exactly alike, pierced its dark, convoluted surface. Flexible wires had sprouted among the crystals, each supporting a concave mirror.

  When the mirrors moved, sound and sometimes light emerged from the hollow crystals.