Planeswalker (32 page)

Midway down a spiral stairway, Xantcha encountered a
priest rushing for the surface. Without a gesture or
apology, he shoved her against the spiral's spine. She
slipped down two, treacherously narrow, steps before
catching her balance. The scent of glistening oil was heavy
in his wake, but except in rudeness, he hadn't noticed her.

In her mind, Xantcha heard Ratepe muttering,
Phyrexians: no imagination! Ratepe was young. He hid his
fears in sarcasm. She put one of his stone-shattering
spiders on the spiral's spine.

The stairway ended in a vaulted crypt. Light came from
a pair of filthy lanterns and Phyrexian glows attached
haphazardly to the stone ribs overhead. The sight of
Phyrexian artifacts answered a wealth of questions and left
her feeling anxious within Urza's armor. Xantcha thought
again of Moag and wondered if she shouldn't scurry back to
Russiore, confess her deceit when Urza came for her, and
let him explore the crypt instead of her. But the truth was
that Xantcha feared Urza's anger more than she feared
Phyrexia.

Tiptoeing forward, Xantcha silently apologized to
Ratepe. The crypt's air was pure Phyrexia. Not only was
there some sort of passageway in Avohir's temple, it was
wide open. She might have to tell Urza what she'd found,
after she knew what it was, after she'd shared her
discoveries with Ratepe, with Mishra.

Xantcha came to another door, the source of a fetid
Phyrexian breeze. She hesitated. She had her armor, a boot
knife and a handful of fuming coins, a passive defense and
no offense worth mentioning. Wisdom said, this is foolish,
then she heard a sound behind her, on the spiral stairs,
and wisdom said, hide!

Three steps beyond the door the corridor jogged sharply
to the right and into utter darkness. Xantcha put one hand
behind her back and finger-walked into the unknown. The
loudest sound was the pulsing in her ears. She had a sense
that she'd entered a larger chamber when the breeze died.

She had a sense, too, that she wasn't alone; she was
right.

"Meatling."

Thirty-four hundred years, give or take a few decades,
and Xantcha knew that voice instantly.

"Gix."

Light bloomed around him, gray, heavy light such as
shone on the First Sphere, light that wasn't truly light,
but visible darkness. Xantcha thought the demon was the
light's source and needed a moment to discern the upright
disk gleaming behind him.

Gix had changed since the last time she'd seen him,
corroded, crumbling, and thrust into a fumarole. He'd
changed since the first time, too-taller. She looked at his

waist when she looked straight ahead; symmetric, altogether
more man-shaped, though his metal "skin" didn't completely
hide the glistening sinews and tubes-like a born-man's
veins only filled with glistening oil- that wound over his
green-gold skin. Gix's forehead was monumental and framed a
rubine gem that was almost certainly a weapon. His skull
seemed to have been pivoted open along his brow ridge. A
black-metal serrated spike ran from the base of his neck to
the now-raised base of his skull. From the side, it looked
like the spike was rooted in his spine and attached to a
red, blue, and yellow fish.

In another circumstance, the demon would have been
ludicrous or absurd. Far beneath Avohir's altar, he was the
image of malignity and horror. Xantcha stood transfixed as
a narrow beam of blood-red light shone between her and
Gix's bulging forehead. She felt surprise, then a command:

Obey. Listen and obey.

"Never." Urza's armor wasn't perfect protection against
the demon's invasion of her mind, but added to her own
stubbornness and to the walls she'd made ages ago. Xantcha
defied the demon. "I'll die first."

Gix grinned, all glistening teeth and malice. "Your
wish-"

He probed her mind again, brutally. Xantcha fed him
images of his excoriation. The demon withdrew suddenly, his
metallic chin tucked in a parody of mortal surprise.

"So old?"

Light sprang up in the portal chamber, a catacomb, with
desiccated bodies heaped here and there, all male, all
bearded. The Shratta, if not all of them, then at least a
hundred of them, and probably their leaders. Replaced with
Phyrexians or simply exterminated? Like as not, she'd never
know. Whatever their crimes, Xantcha knew the Shratta would
have suffered horribly before they died; that would have to
suffice for Rat's vengeance.

"Yes, I remember you," Gix whispered. "One of the
first, and still here?" His metal-sheathed shoulders
jerked. "No. Not sent. I saved you back ... Waiting.
Waiting ..." The demon's voice faded. The light in its
forehead flickered. "Xantcha." He made her name long and
sibilant, like a snake sliding over dried leaves. "My
special one. Here ... in Dominaria?"

Before Gix had needed cables and talons to caress
Xantcha chin. Now he used light and encountered Urza's
armor.

"What is this?"

The light bored into her right eye, seeking Xantcha's
past, her history. Defiantly, she threw out images of
Urza's dragon burning through the Fourth Sphere ceiling.

"Yes. Yes, of course. Locked out of Dominaria, where
else would you go? I gave you purpose and you pursued it.
You pursue it still."

The light became softer. It caressed Xantcha's mind.
She shivered within Urza's armor.

"I'll tell Urza that the demon who destroyed his
brother has returned."

It was a guess on Xantcha's part, Ratepe had seen Gix
in Mishra's Weakstone recordings, but he'd never said
anything about the Phyrexians who'd undertaken Mishra's
compleation. But it was a good guess.

"Yes," Gix sighed. "Tell Urza that Gix has returned.
Tell him the Thran are waiting for him."

Xantcha didn't understand. The Phyrexians had fought
the Thran. Her mind swirled with echoes of Urza's lectures
about Koilos and a noble race that sacrificed itself for
Dominaria's future.

Gix laughed. All the raucous birds and chittering
insects of summer couldn't have equaled the sound. "Did he
tell you that? He knows better. He was there."

The statement made no sense. Urza had found his eyes at
Koilos and through them, remembered the final battle
between the Thran and the Phyrexians, but he hadn't been
there. Gix was toying with her, feeding on her confusion
and terror, waiting for her to make the mistake that would
let him into her secret places.

"You have no secrets, Xantcha." More laughter. "I made
the stone the brothers broke, and I made the brothers, too,
and then I made you."

"Lies," Xantcha shot back and remembered standing
beside a vat. A body floated below the surface: dark
haired, angular, sexless ... her. "There were a thousand
of us," she shot back.

"Seven thousand, and only one like you. I looked for
you ... after."

After he escaped the Seventh Sphere? "I have my own
heart."

"Yes. You have done well, Xantcha. Better than I hoped.
I had plans for you. I still have them. Come back. Listen
and obey!"

Gix pulled a string in Xantcha's mind. She felt herself
begin to unravel. Newts had no importance. Newts did what
they were told. Newts listened and obeyed. She belonged
with Gix, to Gix, in Phyrexia, her home. Gix would take
care of her. The demon was the center. She would do as he
wished.

Urza's armor was in the way....

Xantcha was about to release the armor when she thought
of Ratepe. Suddenly there was nothing else except his face,
laughing, scowling, watching her as she walked across the
Medran plaza with a purse of gold on her belt. The
sensations lasted less than a heartbeat, then Gix was back,
but Xantcha hadn't needed a whole heartbeat to retreat from
the destructive folly she'd been about to commit.

"So, you found him," Gix said after he'd retreated from
her mind. "Does he please you?"

The red light continued to shine in her eye. Gix would
pull another string, and this time there'd be no Ratepe,
son of Mideah, to surprise the demon. Ratepe had given
Xantcha a second chance, but she had to seize it. And
Xantcha did, diving to her left, toward the corridor.
Something hard and heavy struck her back. It threw her
forward. She skidded face-first along the floor-stones,
surrounded by red light, but the armor held. Xantcha
scrambled to her feet and ran for her life. Demons weren't
accustomed to defiance. They had no reflex response to stop
a newt's desperate escape. Gix chased her, but he didn't
catch her before she reached the spiral stairway.

He howled and clawed the stones, but the passage was
too tight, too narrow. A fireball engulfed Xantcha in an
acid wind. She clung to the spine until it passed, then ran

again, through the corridor, the cloister and into Avohir's
sanctuary.

Night had fallen on the plaza. Xantcha wasted no time
asking herself where the day had gone. She released the
armor, yawned out the sphere as soon as she dared, and
headed up the coast to Russiore.

Urza and Xantcha 'walked away from Serra's realm not
long after Xantcha gave him her heart. Xantcha was scarcely
wiser about the imperfections of Serra's creation than
she'd been when she'd walked into the palace, though it was
clear that her presence, so close to the Cocoon, affected
not only the realm as a whole but Sosinna's recovery from
the Aegis bums. For Sosinna and Kenidiern, Xantcha would
have accepted Serra's offer of transit to another, natural
and inherently balanced world, but the offer was not made a
second time. Urza accepted Serra's judgment. Even though he
distrusted Xantcha as a Phyrexian, he'd been through too
much with her to go on alone.

He held Xantcha in his arms for that first terrible
step across the chasm that separated a willfully created
plane from the natural multiverse. She held a sealed chest
nearly filled with gifts from Lady Serra. The gifts
included a miniature cocoon that was the perfect size for
Xantcha's amber heart.

Their first natural world was a tiny, airless moon
circling another world that appeared to be one vast blue-
green ocean, though Urza said otherwise. He made a chamber
beneath the moon's surface and filled it with breathable
air, his usual course in a place where he could survive
indefinitely but Xantcha could not.

"A terrible thing, this," he said, removing Xantcha's
heart from the chest and placing it in a niche he had just
finished. "I believe it contains everything they took away
from you, even your soul."

Despite his incursion into Phyrexia, and Lady Serra's
assertion that Xantcha wholly and entirely differed from
any born man or woman, Urza wouldn't surrender his belief
that she'd been stolen from her parents and abominably
transformed by her Phyrexian captors. She no longer
bothered arguing the point with him. It was reassuring to
be treated as he had always treated her.

"I would destroy it, if I could find a way to return
what it has taken. But that mystery does not solve itself
easily, and I cannot devote my energies to it until I have
determined the first plane of the Phyrexians and my
vengeance has feasted on their entrails. You will
understand that vengeance must come first."

Xantcha nodded unnecessarily. Urza had not asked her a
question. His concentration did not extend beyond his own
thoughts, and he didn't notice her head moving.

"Serra and I determined that the true number of natural
planes in the multiverse cannot be counted, even by an
immortal. If one started at the beginning, new planes would
have emerged, and old planes would have disappeared before
the count was concluded. This is not, however, an
insurmountable problem, as we can be certain that the
Phyrexians were not driven away from a freshly engendered

plane, and while it would be a tragedy if their keystone
plane had succumbed to entropy and reorganization, we need
not blame ourselves for the loss. Thus, it is only
necessary that I start somewhere and proceed with great
precision until I reach the end, which, with the
multiverse, is also the beginning. Do you understand what
this means?'

Xantcha nodded again, confident that Urza would
continue explaining himself until her answer was truthful.

"Good. I will, of necessity, 'walk lightly. I had
thought of creating my own plane, since such planes are
always accessible across the chasm, but I would have to
create a plane in which both you and I could thrive, and
Serra told me that such a creation would be quite difficult
to manage. Black essence, which is to say your essence, and
white, which is mine, are deeply opposed to each other and
virtually impossible to balance in the microcosm of a
created plane. Now, I do not shirk challenges, but I must
avenge my brother before I allow myself the pleasures of
pure research, thus I have put creation out of my mind. I
will make do with bolt-holes such as this, which I will
forge and relocate as I have need of them. There is an
element of proximity in the multiverse, and eventually one
is within an easy 'walk of a particular plane.

"This should be an especial relief to you, Xantcha,
since I will keep your heart in such a place where it
cannot be lost or disturbed. It is also useful for me,
since when I know where you are, I also know where your
heart is, and contrariwise as well. And Serra has returned
that crystal pendant I gave you while I was fleeing
Phyrexia." He fished it out of one of the many boxes and
draped it around Xantcha's neck. "You, I, and your heart
and my pendant together make a single unit, a triangle, the
strongest of angled structures. None of us can get lost."

Triangles ... triangles with four points? It had to
be mathematics.... Of all the lessons Xantcha had been
taught in the Fane of Flesh, mathematics had come hardest.
She'd long since learned that she didn't need to understand
the why of mathematics if she simply followed all the
rules. If the rules turned her heart into one of a
triangle's four parts, she'd keep quiet about it. And she'd
survive with her heart in a niche on an airless moon the
same way she'd survived the centuries when it had lain in
the Phyrexian vault.

"What do you need of me?" she asked, hoping to
forestall any further discussion of unimaginable triangles.

"You are good at sniffing out Phyrexians. When we reach
a plane, I want you to explore it, as you would anyway,
looking for infestations."

"I'll need to use the sphere, is that all right?" The
modifications remained a sore point between them. "You'll
fix it so it isn't black anymore?"

Urza ignored her questions. "For me, being somewhere
quickly is easier than getting there slowly. I will search
for the victors, the folk who drove the Phyrexians out and
forced them to create Phyrexia."

You will do what you want, Xantcha thought in the most
private corner of her mind. Of course, so would she. Life
was never better than when she was soaring the windstreams,
chasing her curiosity, trading trinkets with strangers, and

collecting the stories that born-folk told.

"What do I do if I find a Phyrexian infestation?" She
liked the word, her mind filled with possible ways to drive
out an infestation.

"You run away. The moment you are aware of Phyrexians,
you hide yourself in the meeting place I'll point out to
you, and you wait for me. I'll take no more chances with
you and Phyrexians. You are vulnerable to them, Xantcha.
It's no fault of yours-you're brave and good-spirited-but
they tainted you. You are a bell goat and after you
followed me to Phyrexia, my enemies were able to use you to
find me-much as I will use your heart to find you."

I never told you the Ineffable's name. That's how they
found you. Xantcha thought, but said nothing. She'd made
her choice to stay with Urza, even knowing his obsessions
and madness. If he reordered his memories of the past to
absolve himself of blame or responsibility, well-he'd done
it before and he'd do it again. Xantcha believed in
vengeance against Phyrexia and believed that Urza, with all
his flaws, stood a better chance of achieving it than she.

So they began their quest for the victors, the folk
who'd driven the Phyrexians out of the natural multiverse.
Urza set his mark on each world they visited, regardless of
its hospitality. That way, he said, they would know when
they'd come full circle. Xantcha wasn't certain about the
full circle notion; it raised some of the same problems as
a four-pointed triangle, but the marks kept them from
accidentally exploring the same world twice.

It was no surprise to Xantcha that they found very few
hospitable worlds where the Phyrexians had not made an
appearance. She'd been a dodger. She knew about the
relentless explorations carried out by the searcher-
priests. The first few decades after leaving Serra's realm,
she'd spent most of her time huddled up at whatever meeting
place Urza designated, then gradually Urza had relaxed his
rules. She could wander freely, provided she encountered no
active Phyrexians.

Thus began a long, golden period of wandering the
multiverse. Every handful of worlds held one that was
hospitable enough for Xantcha to exchange Urza's armor for
the sphere. Every ten or twelve handfuls of hospitable
worlds revealed one that was interesting, at least to
Xantcha. She became the tourist who delighted in minor
variations, while Urza was on a single-minded quest.

"They were here," he said when they rejoined each
other. They met in a white stone grotto of a world where
elves were the dominant species and civilization was
measured by forests, not cities.

"I know," Xantcha agreed, having found the spoor of two
searcher expeditions and heard tales of demons with
glistening, metallic skin in several languages. "Searchers
came through a good long time ago. They're remembered as
demons and the bringers of chaos. They came through again,
maybe a thousand local years ago, but only in a few places.
They collected beasts both times, I think. There's metal
here, but no mines. The searchers will come back again.
They're waiting for the elves to do the hard work of
opening the ground."

Urza nodded though he wasn't happy. "How did you learn
such things? There are no centers of learning here, few

records in the ground or above it. I have found it most
frustrating!"

"I talk to everyone, Urza. I trade with them," she
explained, handing Urza a sack filled with trinkets and
treasures, her profits from three seasons' wandering. He'd
take them to the bolt-hole where he kept her heart.
"Everyone has a story,"

"A story, Xantcha-what I want is the truth! The hard-
edged truth."

She squared her shoulders. "The truth is, this is not
the victor's world. I could have told you that before the
sun set twice."

"And how could you have done that?"

"No one here knows a word for war."

Urza stiffened. A planeswalker didn't have to listen
with his ears. He could skim thought and meaning directly
off the surface of another mind and drink down a new
language like water. As a result, Urza seldom paid
attention to the actual words he heard or spoke. He handled
surprise poorly, embarrassment, worse. His breathing
stopped, and his eyes shed their mortal illusion.

"I have encountered a new world," he snapped after a
pensive moment. Equilor. His lips hadn't moved.

Xantcha didn't disbelieve him, although Equilor wasn't
a word that she remembered hearing on this or any other
world. "Is it a name?" she asked cautiously.

"An old name. The oldest name. The farthest plane. It
belongs to a plane on the edge of time."

"Another created world, like Phyrexia or Serra's
realm?"

"No, I think not. I hope not."

She'd wager, if she'd ever been the wagering sort, that
Urza hadn't learned of Equilor from the elves of the forest
world but had heard of it years ago and forgotten it until
just now when she'd challenged him.

They set out at once, with no more preparation than
Urza made for any between-worlds journey. He explained that
preparation and, especially, directions weren't important.
'Walking the between-worlds wasn't like walking down a
path. There was no north or south, left or right, only the
background glow of all the planes that were and, rising out
of the glow, a sense of those planes that a 'walker could
reach in a single stride. By choosing the faintest of the
rising planes at each step, Urza insisted they would in
time arrive at Equilor, the plane on the edge of time.

Xantcha couldn't imagine a place where direction didn't
matter, but then, for her the between-worlds remained as
hostile as it had been the first time Urza dragged her
through it. For her the between-worlds was a changeless
place of paradox and sheer terror.

At first, the only evidence she had that Urza was doing
anything different was indirect. Her armor crumbled, the
instant Urza released her, in the air of the next, new
world. There was breathable air in each new world they
'walked to, as if he'd at last given up the notion that the
Phyrexians could have begun on a world without air. And
Urza himself was exhausted when they arrived. He would go
into the ground and sleep as much as a local year while she
explored.

They were some thirty worlds beyond the elven forest

world when Urza announced, as Xantcha shook herself free of
flaking armor:

"Here you do not need to look for Phyrexians. Here we
will find others of my kind."

Urza didn't mean that he'd brought her to Dominaria.
Every so often, he journeyed alone to the brink of his
birth-world to assure himself that it remained safe within
the Shard they'd discovered long ago. Urza meant, instead,
that he'd broken an age-old habit and set them down on a
plane where other 'walkers congregated.

He'd never insinuated that he was unique, at least as
far as 'walking between-worlds. Serra was a 'walker and so,
Xantcha suspected, had been the Ineffable. But Urza had
avoided other 'walkers until they came to the abandoned
world he called Gastal.

"Be wary," he warned Xantcha. "I do not trust them.
Without a plane to bind them, 'walkers forget what they
were. They become predators, unless they go mad."

Knowing Urza fell in the latter category, Xantcha
stayed carefully in his shadow as they approached a small,
fanciful, and entirely illusory pavilion standing by itself
on a barren, twilight plain, but the three men and two
women they met there seemed unthreatening. They knew Urzaor
knew of him-and welcomed him as a prodigal brother,
though Xantcha couldn't actually follow their conversation:
planeswalkers conversed directly in one another's minds.

But Urza was not the only 'walker who tempered his
solitary life with a more ordinary companion. Outside the
pavilion, Xantcha met two other women, one of them a blind
dwarf, who braved the between-worlds on a 'walker's arm.
Throughout the balmy night, the three of them sought a
common language through which to share experience and
advice. By dawn they'd made progress in a Creole that was
mixed mostly from elven dialects from a hundred or more
worlds. Xantcha had just pieced together that Varrastu, a
dwarf, had heard of Phyrexia when Urza emerged to say it
was time to move on.