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."
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."