by Lynn Abbey
Heart.
Xantcha wriggled out of his embrace. "Give me your knife." She had nothing but her ragged, dirty robe and a pair of sandals.
Urza had a leather sheath slung from his belt. If it wasn't real, he could make it real with a thought. "Please, Urza let me have your knife, any knife."
"Xantcha, don't be foolish. You were always happiest when we settled in one place."
"I'm not going to be foolish. I just want to borrow your knife! I'll find something else that's sharp-"
She eyed the cocoon's golden crystals, and Urza relented. The knife he handed her had a blade no longer than her longest finger-which would have been plenty long enough to slash her throat, if she'd been determined to bleed to death. But Xantcha had never in her life wanted to die. She wasn't fond of pain, either, when there were other alternatives, which, at that moment there weren't.
Xantcha put a few paces between them. Then, with a steady hand, she plunged the short knife into her flank
where she'd tucked her heart away. Her hand was shaking as she lengthened the incision. Urza tried to stop her. Panic gave her the strength to reach inside.
"My heart," she said, offering him the bloodstained amber. "If you think I'm untrustworthy, if you think I belong to the Ineffable, crush it and I'll die. I swore I'd never betray you. I'd rather die than live knowing that you've abandoned me."
"Xantcha!" Urza reached for the wound, which he could heal with a touch.
She staggered backward. "Take it! If I am what you say I am, I don't want to live. But if you won't kill me, then take me with you."
CHAPTER 17
Xantcha awoke with her butt on the ground and her back against an apple tree's broken trunk. Torn branches with upside-down leaves blocked her view of the world. There were green apples piled in her lap and the crook of her throbbing arm. The portal explosion had thrown her so hard she'd shattered a tree when she fell, but Urza's armor had kept her whole.
Ratepe stood among the branches, looking anxious, but not at her.
"How long was I out?" she asked, reaching for the waterskin he dangled with her good arm.
"A bit..."
He dropped the waterskin in her lap. Whatever had his attention wasn't letting it go. She pulled the cork with her teeth and took a swallow before asking:
"What's out there?"
"He came out of nowhere, as soon as you'd fallen. His eyes blazed lightning and fire."
Xantcha imagined the worst. "Another Phyrexian?"
She tried to stand but armor or no armor, Phyrexian or no Phyrexian, she'd taken a beating, and her body wasn't ready for anything. Latching onto the hem of Ratepe's tunic, Xantcha dragged herself upright.
The awe-inspiring invader had been Urza, not another Phyrex-ian. Garbed in stiff armor and looking like a painted statue, he contemplated the metal-and-oil wreckage. He carried an ornate staff, the source of the lightning web that ebbed and flowed around him. Xantcha thought Urza had lost that staff ages ago when they were dodging Phyrexian ambushes. She wasn't entirely pleased to see it again.
Her battered arm wanted out of the armor. Xantcha would have preferred to wait until she had a better sense of Urza's mood, but there wasn't time for that. She silently recited the mnemonic that dissolved the armor. Her arm swelled immediately.
"Has he said anything?" she asked.
"Not a word. The way he looked, I got out of his way. Might've been better if there had been another Phyrexian for him to fry?"
"Might've," Xantcha agreed.
If there'd been an upright Phyrexian in the vicinity, Urza would have had another target besides her. She couldn't remember the last time he'd come charging to her rescue. In point of fact, she didn't think he had come to
her rescue. Since they'd gotten to Dominaria, Xantcha's heart had sat gathering dust on a shelf in Urza's alcove. She didn't think Urza had given it a second thought in over a century, but she wasn't surprised that he'd been watching it closely while she and Ratepe were away. She imagined it had flashed when she hit the tree.
Best get it over with, she decided and said to Ratepe, "You wait here," though there was no chance that he'd pay attention, and she was grateful for the help clambering through the tangled branches.
"Been a long time since I've seen a compleat one," she said casually, starting the conversation in the middle, which was sometimes the best way when Urza was rigid and wrapped in power.
"You should have known better than to engage a Phyrexian with my brother beside you!"
Urza was angry. His eyes were fire, his breath sulfur smoke and sparks. Xantcha winced when they landed on her face. He either hadn't noticed-or didn't care-that she wasn't encased in his armor. She was groping for the words that would calm him when Ratepe spoke up.
"This was my idea. We wouldn't have gotten into trouble if I hadn't badgered her into tracking the riders away from Tabarna's palace."
Urza turned without moving. "Palace?" He'd followed her heart between-worlds and didn't know where, precisely, they were.
"Pincar City's a short, hard ride for six men on good horses," Xantcha said and pointed northwest. "We spotted the riders going out a sea gate at sunrise. It was my decision to get involved when I saw them laying down an ambulator's nether end."
"An ambulator, here?"
Urza turned his head, looking for one. He was in the here and now again. Xantcha relaxed.
"We blew it up in the firepots. They had the nether end here. I sure didn't want to go through to get the prime, and I didn't want to risk carrying a loose nether around with me, especially not after what came out. I swear I was expecting sleepers and, at the outside, a tender-priest. Nothing like this."
Urza rolled the wreckage with his staff. Bright, compound eyes lopked up at the sun, metal parts clattered, and Ratepe leapt a foot in the air, thinking it was still alive.
"They've sent a demon," Urza mused, slipping out of Efuand, into his oldest language, pure ancient Argivian.
"Not a demon," Xantcha corrected, sticking with Efuand. "Some new kind of priest. Not as bad as a demon, but pretty bad when you were expecting a cadre of sleepers."
"How do you know what it was if you've never seen it before?" Ratepe asked. A reasonable question, though Xantcha wished he hadn't been staring at Urza's eyes as he asked it.
"Yes," Urza added, back to Efuand. "How can you be sure?" He tipped his staff toward one of the two Efuand corpses lying near the Phyrexian. "Are they sleepers? They have the smell of Phyrexia around them."
Xantcha swallowed her shock. Urza had long admitted that she was better at scenting out Phyrexians, but he'd
never hinted how much better, and she'd never tried to put the distinctions into words, any words from any language, including Phyrexian. "This is a priest-" she nudged the wreckage with her foot-"because it looks like a priest."
"That's not an answer," Ratepe chided.
"I'm not finished!"
Xantcha got on her knees and with her good hand attempted to loosen the Phyrexian's triangular face-plate. It was a struggle. The tenders had compleated it carefully, and it had recently received a generous allocation of glistening oil to bind what remained of its flesh to its metal carapace. Once she'd got her fingertips under one sharp corner, Ratepe helped her pry it off.
Shredded leather clung to the interior of the plate, matching the shreds of a skinless but still recognizably childish face that it had covered.
"It had compleated eyes," Xantcha explained, indicating the coiled wires emerging from the empty sockets. "Only the higher priests and warriors have compleat eyes. And it had an articulated mouth; that's definitely priest-compleat. Diggers and such, they just have boxes in their chests. And all the metal's the same, not scraps. That's priest- compleat, too. It's got no guts, just an oil bladder. A priest's got muscles and nerves, compleated, of course, joined with gears and wire, but it's got the brain it was decanted with. The brain makes it go. That's why most Phyrexians have two arms, two legs, its brain knows two
arms, two legs-"
"You said they weren't flesh," Ratepe interrupted, a bit breathless and green-cheeked. He'd told her once that he hadn't been able to help with the butchering on his family's farm. Probably he wished he hadn't helped her now.
"This isn't flesh." She tore off a shredded bit. Not surprisingly, he wouldn't take it from her hand, but Urza did. "This is what flesh becomes when it is compleated."
"They start with a living man and transform him into this," Urza's voice was flat and cold as he ground the shred between his fingers.
"They start with a newt," Xantcha said flatly.
"So, this is what would have happened to ..." Ratepe couldn't finish his thought aloud.
"If I'd been destined to become a priest."
She could remember the Xantcha who'd waited, hope against hope, for the tender-priests to come for her. Would she have been happier if they had? There was no Phyrexian word for happiness.
"And my brother?" Urza flicked the shred into the weeds. "Did he become a priest? Is that what I fought in Argoth? His skin had been stretched over metal plates, over coiled wire. What was he?"
"A victim," Ratepe answered before Xantcha had a chance. "What about the demons and the sleepers?"
She chose to answer the easy part first. "Sleepers are newts, uncompleated, the way we came out of the vats. But there's oil in the vats, and the smell never goes away. That's how I spot them."
"This one recognized you?" Ratepe always had another question.
Xantcha shrugged. "Maybe, if I hadn't gotten its attention first." She rubbed the hollow of her neck. "That
left arm, Urza. It shot something new at me. Your armor barely stopped it, and for a moment I was glowing blue. And those canisters you made for the firepots? The glass shards are worthless, but the shrieking ones, they brought this priest to its knees."
Urza snapped the wreck's left arm at the shoulder with no more apparent effort than she'd need to break a twig. He angled it this way and that in the sun as glistening oil poured over his hand.
"Do sleeprs know what they are?" Yet another question from Ratepe.
"I was destined to sleep and I knew, so I assume they know, but I think, lately, that I'm wrong. The sleepers I've seen don't seem to recognize one another, don't seem to know they weren't born. And if you were going to ask-" she pointed to the Efuand corpses-"they're not sleepers."
"How do you know?" Urza demanded. "How can you be certain? They're man-shaped, not like you. And they smell."
Xantcha rolled her eyes. "Gix corrected the man-woman mistake before they excoriated him. Sleepers were men and women before I left the First Sphere. Phyrexians know about gender,
Urza, they've just decided it's the way of flesh and not the way they're going to follow. These Efuands, they've got oil on the outside from handling the ambulator. Right now, you smell of glistening oil. Sleepers have oil on the inside, in their breath."
"So you cover your mouth?" Ratepe asked.
She nodded. He'd watched her do that more than once. "If they're not breathing, you might have to cut them open to be sure."
"Have you cut them open, to be sure?" Urza asked.
Xantcha answered. "I've always been sure."
She met Urza's eyes, they were mortal-brown just then. How many times in the past two hundred years had she sent him out to confirm her sightings? He always said she'd been correct, always told her never to risk encountering them again, but had he ever scented a Dominarian sleeper?
"I have cut them open," Urza confessed. "I've killed and eviscerated men and women because they smelled, faintly, of Phyrexia. But when I examined them outside, I saw only men and women, not what you have become, what my brother became. Even on the inside, there was nothing unusual about them. They had a black mana essence, but essence isn't everything. It doesn't make a man or woman a Phyrexian."
Xantcha didn't know what to say and was grateful when Ratepe asked:
"What about demons?"
"The demons are what they are-and that is an answer. They're as old as Phyrexia, as old as the Ineffable. They're powerful, they're evil. They smell of oil, of course, but, in Phyrexia, I knew a demon when I saw one because I felt fear inside me."
"Mishra met a demon." Ratepe's eyes were glazed. His attention was focused between his ears where he heard the Weakstone sing. "Gix."
The bees in the orchard were louder than Ratepe's whispered declaration, but he got Xantcha's attention and Urza's too.
"Names are just sounds," Urza said, the same as he'd said when Xantcha told him-long before she read The Antiquity Wars-the only demon's name she knew. "The Brotherhood of Gix was ancient before I was born. They venerated mountains, gears, and clockwork. They were susceptible to Phyrexian corruption after my brother and I inadvertently broke the Thran lock against Phyrexia, but neither they nor their god could have been Phyrexian."
"Gix promised everything. He knew how to bring metal to life and life to metal." Ratepe's voice remained soft. It was hard to tell if he was frightened by what he heard in his mind or dangerously tempted by it.
"Ratepe?" Xantcha reached across the wrecked priest to take Ratepe's hand. It was limp and cold. "Those things didn't happen to you. Don't let Gix into your memory. Gix was excoriated more than three thousand years ago, immersed in steaming acid and thrown into the pit. He can't touch you."
"You cannot seriously think that there is a connection between the memories placed in your mind and those in Mishra"s," Urza argued. "At best there is a coincidence of sound, at worst ... remember, Xantcha, your thoughts are not your own! Haven't you learned?"
Still clinging to Ratepe's hand, Xantcha faced Urza. "Why is it that everything you believe is the absolute truth and anything I believe is foolishness? I was meant to sleep here-right here in Dominaria. I dreamed of this place. I was decanted knowing die language that you and Mishra spoke as children. There is something about this world, above all the others, that draws Phyrexia back. They tried to conquer the Thran. That didn't work so they tried to get you and Mishra to conquer each other. Now they're trying a third time. Big wars didn't work, so they're trying lots of little wars. If you would listen to someone else for a change instead of always having to be the only one with the right answers-"
Ratepe squeezed Xantcha's hand and helped her to her feet. "Xantcha's got a point, Urza. Why here? Why do the Phyrexians come back to this world?"
Urza 'walked away rather than answer, and this time he didn't come back.
"I shouldn't have challenged him." Xantcha leaned against Ratepe, grateful to have someone to share her misery with, and aware, too, that she would have spoken much differently if there hadn't been three of them gathered around the Phyrexia wreckage. "I always lose my temper at the wrong time. He was so close to seeing the truth, but I had to have it all."
"You're more like Mishra than I am." Ratepe wrapped his arms around her. "Must've been something Gix poured in your vat."
He was jesting, but the joke made Xantcha's heart skip a beat. What had Oix said on the First Sphere plain? She remembered the spark and walling herself within herself, but the words hung outside of memory's reach. What had happened to Mishra's flesh? Flesh was rendered, never wasted. Had she been growing in the vats while Urza and Mishra fought? She'd thought she had.
Xantcha leaned back against Ratepe's arms and saw the thoughtful look on his face.
"Don't," she said, a plea more than a command. "Don't say anything more. Don't think anything more."
Arms tightened around her, one at her waist, the other cradling her head. She couldn't see his face, but she knew he hadn't stopped thinking.
Xantcha hadn't either, though there was neither joy nor satisfaction in any of her conclusions.
"We've got to leave," she said many silent moments later. "Someone's going to wonder what happened to the riders."
"If we're lucky, someone. Something, if we're not."
Xantcha grimaced. Ratepe's humor was missing its mark, and her arm, compressed betwe
en them, kept her edgy with its throbbing. "Whichever, we're going to have to leave this for someone else to sort out. I should've shoved the priest through before we destroyed the ambulator."
"Then there wouldn't have been anything for Urza to look at."
"Not sure whether that was good or bad."
Ratepe let her go and did most of the work assembling their supplies in a pile for the sphere to flow around. One look at his face and Xantcha knew he was disappointed that they weren't returning to Pincar City, but he never raised the subject. Her elbow had swollen to the size of a winter melon and her arm, from the shoulder down, looked as if it had been pumped full of water.
Her fingers resembled five purple sausages. Her arm was rigid, too. It had been centuries since she'd had an injury Urza hadn't healed, She'd almost forgotten how newts stiffened when they broke their bones.
If Xantcha had the nerves Ratepe had been born with, she would have been curled up, whimpering, on the ground. As it was, she was grateful for Ratepe's company, sought the calmest wind-streams through the air, and brought them down frequently.
Twice over the following several days they spotted gangs of bearded men riding good horses through the summer heat. She grit her teeth and followed them, still hoping to find a Shratta stronghold, but both times the men ended their treks peaceably in palisaded villages. Either the religious fanatics had gone to ground or they'd gone from dreaded to welcome in little more than a season. She thought of going up to the gates and inviting herself into their councils, as she had scarcely a season earlier. Her arm kept her from acting on those thoughts.
"It was your idea to disperse those villagers, let them spread the word that it was Red-Stripes who were killing and burning in the Shratta's name," Xantcha reminded Ratepe as she guided the sphere to its prior course. "You're the one who told me that I was a friend because I was the enemy of your enemy. What did you expect?"
"Not this," Ratepe replied with a scowl. "Maybe I'm wiser now. The enemy of my enemy still has his own plans for me."