A rare smile lit up her companion's face. "That bad
still?"
"Worse. But please, go to Baszerat and Morvern. A
quarrel has become a war. So it began with the Fallaji and
the Yotians. Who knows, there might be brothers.... You've
been up here too long, Urza."
Urza reached into her mind again, gathering landmarks
and languages, which she willingly surrendered. Then, in a
blink's time, she was back into her own proper
consciousness. Urza faded into the between-worlds, which
was, among other things, the fastest way to travel across
the surface of a single world.
"Good luck," she wished him, then knelt down.
Crashing crockery had crushed a good many of Urza's
gnats. Quicksilver had dissolved uncounted others. Yet many
swirled around in confusion on the floor. Xantcha labored
until midnight, gathering them into a box no deeper than
her finger, but far too steep for any of them to climb.
When the dirt was motionless, she took the box into the
alcove where Urza stored his raw materials.
The shelves were neat. Every casket and flask was
clearly labeled, albeit in a language Xantcha couldn't
read. She didn't need to read labels. The flask she wanted
had a unique lambent glow. It was pure phloton, distilled
from fire, starlight and mana, a recipe Urza had found on
the world were he'd found Xantcha. "Waste not, want not,"
she whispered over the seething box. The gnats blazed like
fireflies as they fell through the phloton, and then were
gone.
Xantcha resealed the flask and replaced it on the
shelf, exactly as she'd found it, before returning to her
own room. She had a plan of her own, which she'd promised
herself she'd implement when the time was right. That time
had come when Urza touched her hair.
If Urza couldn't see the present Phyrexian threat
because he was obsessed with the past... If he couldn't
care about the folk of Baszerat or Morvem because he still
cared too much about what had happened to Mishra, then
Xantcha figured she had to bring the past and Mishra to
Urza. She had it all worked out in her mind, as much as she
ever worked anything out: find a young man who resembled
Kayla's word picture, teach him the answers to Urza's
guilty questions, then troll her trumped-up Mishra past
Urza's eyes.
A new Mishra wouldn't cure his madness. Nothing could
do that, not while those powerstone eyes were lodged in
Urza's skull, but if a false Mishra could convince Urza to
walk away from his worktable, that would be enough.
Morning came to the Ohran Ridge, and found Xantcha
sitting in the bottom of a transparent sphere as it drifted
above springtime mountain meadows. The sphere was as big
around as Xantcha was tall and had been a gift from Urza.
Or more accurately, the artifact that produced it had been
Urza's gift. He'd devised the cyst to preserve her as she
followed him from world to world. A deliberate yawn and a
mnemonic rhyme drew a protective oil out of the cyst.
Depending on the rhyme, the oil expanded into the buoyant
sphere or ripened into a tough, flexible armor.
Urza had taught Xantcha the rhyme for the armor. The
sphere was the result of Xantcha's curiosity and
improvisations. Urza complained that she'd transformed his
Thran-inspired artifact into a Phyrexian abomination. The
complaint, though sincere, had always perplexed Xantcha.
The Thran, as Urza described them, believed that sentience
and artifice must always be separate. Xantcha's cyst wasn't
remotely sentient, and she supposed she could have dug it
out of her stomach, but it had become part of her, no
different than her arms ... or Urza's faceted eyes.
Besides, if she hadn't discovered how to make her sphere,
Urza would have had to provide her with food, clothing, and
all the other things a flesh and blood person required,
because Xantcha, though she was almost as old as Urza, was
indisputably flesh and blood.
And just as indisputably Phyrexian.
Xantcha willed the sphere higher, seeking the swift
wind-streams well above the mountains. She had a long
journey planned, and needed strong winds if she wanted to
finish it before Urza returned from the south. The sphere
rose until the landscape resembled Urza's tabletop, and the
sphere began to tumble.
Tumbling never bothered Xantcha. With or without the
cyst, she had a strong stomach and an unshakable sense of
direction. But tumbling wasted time and energy. Xantcha
raised her arms level with her shoulders, one straight out
in front of her, the other extended to the side; the
tumbling stopped. Then she pointed both extended arms in
the direction she wished to travel and rotated her hands so
they were both palms up. She thought of rigging and sails,
a firm hand on the tiller board, and the sphere began to
move against the wind.
It was slow going at first, but before the sun had
risen another two hand spans, Xantcha was scudding north
faster than any horse could run. Xantcha couldn't explain
how the sphere stayed aloft. It wasn't sorcery; she had no
talent for calling upon the land. Urza swore it wasn't
anything to do with him or his artifacts and refused to
discuss the matter. Xantcha thought it was no different
than running. The whys and wherefores weren't important so
long as she found what she was looking for and got home
safe.
But questions lurked where Xantcha's memories began.
They crept forward once the sphere was moving smartly, and
there was nothing to do but think and remember.
* * *
The beginning was liquid, thick and warm as blood, dark
and safe. After the liquid came light and cold, emptiness
and hard edges, a dim chamber in the Fane of Flesh, the
first place she'd known, a soot-stained monolith of
Phyrexia's Fourth Sphere. Her beginning wasn't birth, not
as Urza had been born from his mother's body. There were no
mothers or fathers in the decanting chamber only metal and
leather priests tending stone-gouged vats. The vat-priests
of the Fane of Flesh were of no great status. Though
compleat, their appliances were mere hooks and paddles and
their senses were no better than the flesh they'd been
decanted with. They took orders from above. In Phyrexia
there was always above-or within, deeper and deeper through
the eight spheres to the center where dwelt the Ineffable.
He whose name was known but never spoken, lest he awaken
from his blessed sleep.
Obey, the vat-priests said unnecessarily as she'd
shivered and discovered her limbs. A small, warm stone fell
from her hands. The vat-priests had said it was her heart
and took it from her. There was a place, they said-in
Phyrexia everything had a place, without place there was
nothing-where hearts were kept. Her mistakes would be
written on her heart, and if she made too many mistakes,
the Ineffable who dwelt at Phyrexia's core would make her a
part of his dreams, and that would be the end of her. Obey
and learn. Pay attention. Make no mistakes. Now, follow.
Later, when Xantcha had crossed more planes and visited
more worlds than she could easily recount, she'd realize
that there was no other place like Phyrexia. In no other
world were full-grown newts, like her, decanted beside a
sludge-vat. Only Phyrexian newts remembered the first
opening of their eyes. Only Phyrexian newts remembered, and
understood, the first words-threats- they heard. In her
beginning, there was only the Fane of Flesh, and she obeyed
without question, writhing across the stone floor because
she hadn't the strength to walk.
Xantcha's bones hardened quickly. She learned to tend
herself and perform such tasks as were suited to newts.
When she had mastered those lessons, the vat-priests led
her to the teacher-priests, who instructed the newts as
they were transformed from useless flesh into compleat
Phyrexians. The teacher-priests with their recording eyes
and stinging-switch arms told her that she was Xantcha.
Xantcha wasn't a name, not as she later came to
understood names. When Urza had asked, she had explained
that Xantcha was the place where she stood when newts were
assembled for instruction, the place where she received her
food, and the box where she slept at night.
If days or nights had played a part in her early life.
Phyrexia was a world without sun, moon, or stars. Deep
in the Fane of Flesh, priests called out the march of time:
when she learned, when she ate, when she slept; there was
no time for rest, no place for companionship. When she was
returned to her box for sleeping, Xantcha dreamed of
sunlight, grass and wind. She might have thought it strange
that her mind held images of a place so clearly not
Phyrexia, if she'd thought at all.
Even now, more than three millennia after her first
awakenings, Xantcha didn't know if she'd been the only newt
who'd dreamed of a green, sunlit world, or if the Ineffable
had commanded the same dreams and longings for every newt
that learned beside her.
You are newts, and newts you will remain, the teacher-
priests had taught her. You are destined to sleep in
another place and prepare the way for those who will
follow. Listen and obey.
There were many other newts in the Fane of Flesh,
organized into cadres and marched together through their
educations. All newts began the same way, with meat and
bones and blood-filled veins, then-according to their place
in the Ineffable's design- tender-priests excised their
flesh and reshaped their bodies with tough amalgams of
metal and oil, until they were compleated. After each
reshaping, the priests sent the excised flesh and blood to
the renderers; eventually it was returned it to the vats.
When the newt was fully reshaped, the tenders immersed it
in the glistening oil; a Phyrexian's first time in the
great fountain outside the Fane of Flesh. When it emerged,
the newt was compleat and took its destined place in the
Ineffable's grand plan for Phyrexia.
Xantcha remembered standing in her place on a Fane
balcony, as fully reshaped newts were carried to the
fountain. She remembered the cacophony as newly compleated
Phyrexians emerged into the glare and glow of the Fourth
Sphere furnaces. To the extent that any newt felt hope, it
hoped for a good compleation, a privileged place. The
knowledge that she would be forever bound in a newt's body
was greater pain than any punishment the priests ever
lashed across her back.
Hatred had no place in Phyrexia. Contempt replaced
hatred and looked down on the special newts, whose destiny
was to sleep in another place. Xantcha looked forward to
the moments when she was alone in her box with her dreams.
Once she went to sleep, dreamed her dreams, as she'd
always done, and awoke beneath the bald, gray sky of the
First Sphere. There were different teacher-priests tending
her cadre. The new priests were larger than those in the
Fane of Flesh. More metal than leather, they had four feet
and four arms. Their feet were clawed, and each of their
arms ended in a different metal weapons. They were supposed
to protect the newts from the dangers of the First Sphere.
Newts had never dwelt on the First Sphere, but the four-
armed teachers were not honored by their new
responsibilities. They obeyed their orders without
enthusiasm, until one of the newts made a mistake.
Newts you are, and newts you shall remain forever,
they'd recite as they dealt out punishment with one hand
after the other. You are destined to sleep on another
world. Now learn the ways of another world. Listen and
obey.
Xantcha wondered what would have happened if she'd
failed to listen or obey. At the time, the notion simply
didn't occur to her. Life on the First Sphere was hard
enough without disobedience. The newts were taught farming,
in preparation for the day when their destiny would be
fulfilled, but the slippery dirt of the First Sphere
resisted their every effort. The plows, sickles, hoes, and
pitchforks that they were commanded to use left their
muscles aching. The whiplike, razor-grass-the only plant
they could grow-slashed them bloody, and the harsh light
blistered their skin mercilessly.
Xantcha remembered another newt, Gi'anzha; whose place
was near hers in the cadre. Gi'anzha had used a grass sheaf
to hack off its arm, then shoved a pitchfork shaft into the
bloody socket. Gi'anzha was meat by the time they found it,
but Xantcha and the other newts understood why it had done
what it had.
Newts were small and fragile compared to everything
else that dwelt on the First Sphere. Their uncompleated
bodies suffered injuries rather than malfunctions. They
could not be repaired but were left to heal as best they
could, which sometimes wasn't good enough. Failed newts-
meat newts-were whisked back to the Fourth Sphere for
rendering. Waste not, want not, nothing in Phyrexia was
completely without use, though meat was reviled by the
compleat, who'd transcended their flesh and were sustained
by glistening oil.
As her cadre was reduced to meat, Xantcha's place
within it changed. Another newt should have been Xantcha,
she should have become G'xi'kzi or Kra'tzin, but too much
time had passed since the vat-priests had organized the
cadre. The patterns of their minds were as fixed as those
of their soft, battered bodies. Xantcha she was, and
Xantcha she remained, even when the cadre had shrunk so
much that the priests alloyed it with another, similarly
depleted group.
Xantcha found herself face-to-face with another
Xantcha. For both of them, it was... confusion. The word
scarcely existed in Phyrexia, except to describe the clots
of slag and ash that accumulated beneath the great
furnaces. Together they consulted the priests, as newts
were trained to do. The priests judged that as a result of
the recombination, neither of them truly stood in the spot
of Xantcha. The alloyed cadre's Xantcha was a third newt,
who thought of itself as Hoz'krin and wanted no part of
this Xantcha confusion. Xantcha and Xantcha were each told
to recognize new places within the alloyed cadre or face
the lash.
Lash or no, the priests' judgment was not acceptable.
Places had become names that could not be surrendered, even
under the threat of punishment. The Xantchas stayed awake
when they should have slept in their boxes. They slipped
away from the priests and spoke to each other privately.
Meeting in private with another newt was something neither
had done before. They negotiated and they compromised,
though there were no Phyrexian words for either process.
They agreed to make themselves unique. Xantcha broke off a
blade of the razor-sharp grass and hacked off the hair
growing on the left side of her skull. The other Xantcha
soaked its hair in an acid stream until it turned orange.
They had rebelled-a word as forbidden as the
Ineffable's true name and almost as feared. Only the
tender-priests could change a newt's shape and only
according to the Ineffable's plan. When the Xantchas
returned to the place where their cadre gathered for food
and sleep, the other newts gaped and turned away, as the
teacher-priests came rumbling and clanking from the
perimeter.
Xantcha had taken the other newt's flesh-fingered hand.
Thirty-three hundred Dominarian years afterward, Xantcha
knew that the touch of flesh was a language unto itself, a
language that Phyrexia had forgotten. At the time, the
gesture had confused the priests utterly and left them
spinning in their tracks.
Not long after, the bald, gray sky had brightened
painfully.
Xantcha had recalled her heart and the vat-priests'
threat: too many mistakes and the Ineffable would seize her
heart. Until the other Xantcha had tumbled into her life,
she'd made less than her share of the cadre's mistakes, but
perhaps one mistake, if it were great enough, was enough to
rouse the Ineffable.
She'd thought the shining creature who'd descended from
the too-bright sky was the Ineffable. He was nothing like
the priests she'd seen and nothing at all like a newt. His
eyes were intensely red, and an abundance of teeth filled
his protruding jaw. And she'd known, perhaps because of
that jaw filled with teeth, that it was he, as the
Ineffable was he and not it in the way of newts and
priests.
"You can call me Gix," he'd said, using his toothsome
jaw to shape the words in an almost newtish way, though he
didn't have the soft-flesh lips that were useful for eating
but got in the way of proper Phyrexian pronunciation.