Xantcha lay flat and returned to her first question. "Where am I?"
"You are here. You are being cared for. There is nothing more you need to know."
She'd been so many places, picked up so many languages. Xantcha had to lie very still, listening to her thoughts and memories, before she could be sure she did not know the language she was speaking. It was simply there in her mind, implanted rather than acquired by listening. Another reason to think of Phyrexia.
Xantcha considered it unlucky to think of Phyrexia once before breakfast and here she'd thought of it three times. She realized she was very hungry.
"If I'm being cared for, I'd like something to eat, if you please."
Urza said manners were important among strangers, especially when one was at a stranger's mercy. Of course, he rarely bothered with such niceties. With his power, Urza was never at a stranger's mercy.
Xantcha remembered the turtles, the Phyrexians they'd been fighting before-before what? She couldn't remember how the skirmish had ended, only a bright light and a sense that she'd been falling for a long time before she woke up here, wherever here was.
"The air will sustain you," the voice said. "You do not need to fill yourself with death."
Another thought of Phyrexia, where compleat Phyrexians neither ate nor breathed but were sustained by glistening oil.
"I need food. I'll hunt it myself."
"You'll do no such thing!"
Xantcha pushed herself into a sitting position and got her first look at the voice: a tall woman, thin through the body, even thinner through the face. Her eyes were gray, her hair was pale gold, and her lips were a tight, disapproving line beneath a large, but narrow nose. She seemed young, at least to Xantcha. It seemed, as well, that she had never smiled or laughed.
"Who are you?" Xantcha asked. Though, what are you? was the question foremost in her mind.
The multiverse might well contain an infinite number of worlds, but it had no more than two-score of sentient types, if Xantcha followed Urza's example and disregarded those types that, though clearly sentient, were also completely feral and without the hope of civilization. Or nearly four-score, if she followed her own inclination to regard men and women of every type as distinct species.
Urza's type was the most common and with the arrogance of the clear majority. He called himself simply a man where others were elf-men, or dwarf-men, or gremlin-men. His wife, Kayla Bin-Kroog had been a woman, a very beautiful woman. When Xantcha had asked Urza for a single word that united men and women, as elves united elf-man and elf- woman, he'd answered mankind, which seemed to her a better way of uniting all the men, common and rare rather than common men with their wives and daughters.
When she'd demanded a better word, Urza had snarled and 'walked away. Xantcha wondered what he'd make of the woman standing in front of her. Wonder sparked a hope he was still alive, and that she'd find him here, but another thought crowded Urza from Xantcha's mind. She and the stranger were both dressed in long white gowns.
Where had her clothes gone? Her sword and knives? The shoulder sack filled with stew and treasure? Except for the gown, Xantcha was naked. She wondered if the stern-faced woman was naked, if she was really a woman after all. Her voice was quite deep, and her breasts were a far cry from generous.
That was very nearly a fifth Phyrexian thought before breakfast, and since the stranger had given no indication that she was going to answer any of her questions, Xantcha got her feet under her and pushed herself upright. Another bout of dizziness left her grateful for the nearby rock.
She rested with her back against the stone and took a measure of the world where she'd awakened. It was a golden place of rolling hills and ripened grasses, all caught in the afterglow of a brilliant sunset, with clear air and layers upon layers of clouds overhead. It was difficult, though, to discern where west lay. Urza had explained it to her in the earliest days. Wherever men dwelt, the sun set in the west and rose in the east. In all quarters the horizon was marked with dazzling amber peaks that might have been mountains or might have been clouds. It was achingly beautiful and almost as strange.
On impulse, Xantcha looked for her shadow and found it huddled close by her feet, where she'd expect to find it at high noon. Curiosity became suspicion that got the better of her manners, "Does this world mark time by the sun?" she asked with a scowl, a sixth Phyrexian thought. "Or do you live in immortal sunset?"
The stranger drew back and seemed, somehow, taller. "We think of it as sunrise."
"Does the sun ever get risen ?"
"Our Lady has created all that you can see, each cloud, each breeze, each stone, each tree and blade of grass. She has created them all at their moment of greatest beauty. There is peace here and no need for change."
Xantcha let out a long, disbelieving breath. "Waste not, want not."
"Exactly," the stranger replied, though Xantcha had not intended the Phyrexian maxim as a compliment.
"Are we alone?"
"No."
"Where are the others?"
"Not here."
Xantcha's dizziness had passed. If there were others elsewhere, she was ready to look for them. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and yawned.
"Not here!" the woman repeated, an emphatic command this time.
Listen and obey the vat-priests had told Xantcha in the beginning, and despite the passage of time, she still found it difficult to disobey, especially when the cyst felt heavy in her gut, heavy and oddly unreliable. She swallowed the lump that was part unemerged sphere and part rising panic.
"How did I get here?"
"I don't know."
"How long have I been here."
"Since you arrived."
"Where am I?"
"Where you are."
Panic surged again, and this time Xantcha couldn't fight it down. "What manner of world is this?" she shouted. "The sun doesn't rise or set. You give me answers that aren't answers. Is this Phyrexia? Is that it? Have I been brought back to Phyrexia?"
The stranger blinked but said nothing.
"Can I leave? Is Urza here? Can I find Urza?"
More silence. Xantcha wanted to run. She was lucky she could walk. Her legs had become the legs of a lethargic stranger. Every step required concentration, calculation, and blind faith as she transferred weight from one foot to
the other. After ten strides, Xantcha was panting and needed to rest. She didn't dare sit down for fear she wouldn't have the strength to stand again, so she bent from the hips and kept her balance by bracing clammy, shaking hands on her gown-covered knees.
The stranger wasn't following her. Xantcha pulled herself erect and started walking again. She took nearly twenty cautious steps before her strength gave out. The stranger hadn't moved at all.
Urza! Xantcha thought his name with the same precision she used with her mnemonics when she yawned. Urza had never admitted that he was open to her thoughts, but he'd never denied it, either. Urza, I'm in a strange place. Nothing is all wrong, but it's not right, either and I'm not myself. If you're nearby-?
She stopped short of begging or pleading. If he had survived their last battle ... and Xantcha was unwilling to believe that she had outlived Urza the Artificer, and she certainly couldn't have gotten here on her own. If Urza weren't busy with problems of his own, then he would come. Until then, she would walk.
The heaviness and lethargy didn't go away as the dizziness had, but Xantcha became accustomed to them, as she would have accustomed herself to the rise and fall of a boat's deck. Xantcha might not know where she was or where she was going, but when she looked over her shoulder, she'd left a clean line through the ripe grass.
The stranger had told at least one truth. The air was enough. Xantcha forgot her hunger and never became thirsty, even though, she worked up a considerable sweat forcing herself across the hills. Up and down and up again. Eventually Xantcha lost sight of the stranger and the rock where she'd awakened. There were other rocks along her chosen path, all dun-colored and eroded into curves that were the same, yet also unique.