Oix was a name, the first true name Xantcha had ever
heard, because it couldn't be interpreted as a place within
a cadre. Gix was a demon, a Phyrexian who'd looked upon the
Ineffable face with his own eyes and who, while the
Ineffable slept, controlled Phyrexia. From a newt's lowly
perspective, a demon's name might just as well be
ineffable.
Gix offered his hand. The only sound Xantcha heard was
a slight whirring as his arm extended and extended to at
least twice his height. As Gix's hand unfurled, black
talons sprang from each elegantly articulated finger. He
touched the other Xantcha lightly beneath its chin. Xantcha
felt trembling terror in the other newt's hand. The demon's
talons looked as if they could pierce a priest's leather
carapace or go straight through a newt's skull. A blue-
green spark leapt from the demon to the other Xantcha,
whose hand immediately warmed, relaxed, and slipped away.
Deep-pitched rumbling came out of the demon's throat.
He lowered his hand, his head swiveled slightly, and
Xantcha felt a cold, green light take her measure. Gix
didn't touch her as he'd touched the other Xantcha. His arm
retreated, each segment clicking sharply into the one
behind it, then more whirring as his jaw assumed a sickle
smile.
"Xantcha."
All remaining doubts about the difference between names
and places vanished. Xantcha had become a true name, and
confronted with him, Xantcha became her. The notions for
male and female, dominance and submission, were already in
Xantcha's mind, rooted in her dreams of soft, green grass
and yellow sun.
"You will be ready," the demon said. "I made you. No
simple rendering for you, Xantcha. Fresh meat. Fresh blood.
Brought here from the place where you will go, where you
will conquer. You have their cunning, their boldness, and
their unpredictability, Xantcha, but your heart is mine.
You are mine forever."
The demon meant to frighten her, and he did; he meant
to distract her, too, while a blue-green spark formed on
his shiny brass brow. In that, he was less successful.
Xantcha saw the spark race toward her, felt it strike the
ridge between her eyes and bury itself in the bone. The
demon had inserted himself in her mind.
He made himself glorious before her. At least, that's
what he tried to do. Xantcha felt the urge to worship him
in awe and obedience, to feed him with the mind-storm
turbulence no compleat Phyrexian could experience, except
by proxy. Gix made promises in Xantcha's mind: privilege,
power, and passion, all of them irresistible, or meant to
be irresistible, but Xantcha resisted. She made a new place
for herself, within herself. It wasn't terribly difficult.
If there could be two Xantcha's within the cadre, there
could be two within her mind, a Xantcha who belonged to Gix
and a Xantcha who did not.
She filled the part that belonged to Gix with images
from her dreams: blue skies, green grass, and gentle
breezes. The demon drank them down, then spat them out. The
light went out of his eyes. He turned away from her, to
others in her cadre and found them more entertaining. For
her part, Xantcha stood very still. She had denied the
demon, rejected him before he could reject her. She
expected instant annihilation, but the Ineffable did not
seize her. Whatever else she had done, it was not a mistake
great enough to destroy her heart.
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.
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, making 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.
Good sense prevailed. They let her pass, though Xantcha
figured to keep an eye for her back. Even with a sword, a
slight, beardless youth in too-fine clothes was a tempting
target, especially when the nearest protectors were also
the likeliest predators.
Xantcha followed the widening streets until they
brought her to a plaza, where artisans and farmers hawked
produce from wagons. She gave the horse to the farmer with
the largest wagon in exchange for black bread and dried
fruit. He asked how an unbearded swordsman came to be
peddling a nag in Medran-town. Xantcha recited her made-up
tale. The farmer wasn't surprised that Shratta would have
slain her purported companions.
"The more wealth a man has, the less the Shratta
believe him when he says he abides by the book. Strange,
though, that they'd risk a party as large as the one your
uncle had assembled. Were me, I'd suspect the men he'd
hired weren't what they'd said they were."
Xantcha shrugged cautiously. "I'm sure my uncle thought
the same ... before they killed him." Then, because the
farmer seemed more world-wise than the villagers, she
tempted him with a thought that had nagged her from the
beginning. "He'd hired Red-Stripes. Thought it would keep
us safe. Shratta never attack men with Red Stripes on their
tunics."
The farmer took her bait, but not quite the way she
expected. "The Red-Stripes don't bother the Shratta where
they live, and the Shratta usually return the favor. But
where there's wealth to be taken, every man's a target,
especially to the ..." He fingered the hem of his own
tunic. "I won't speak ill of your dead, but it's a fool who
trusts in stripes or colors."
Xantcha walked away from the wagon, thinking that it
might be better to get out of Medran immediately. She was
headed toward a different gate than the one she'd entered
when she spotted a knot of men and women, huddled in the
shade of a tavern. With a second glance Xantcha saw the
bonds at their necks, wrists, and ankles. Prisoners, she
thought, then corrected herself, slaves.
She hadn't seen slaves the last time she visited Efuan
Pincar, nor had she seen any in the beleaguered villages,
but it was a rare realm, a rarer world that didn't
cultivate slavery in one of its many forms. Xantcha took a
breath and kept walking. She could see that a swaybacked
horse found a good home, but there was nothing she could do
for the slaves.