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."