her completely within two heartbeats, would have driven her to hysteria if it had lasted for a third.
Urza clutched her wrists. The cyst's liquid-her armor- tingled. He began to fade and, looking down, Xantcha saw herself fading as well.
She'd barely begun to scream when her substance was restored, covered by clothing less fine than Urza's, but finer than the rags she'd known all her life. Tempted to fondle the dark blue sleeve, she discovered it was illusion, visible but intangible.
"Later," Urza assured her. "Not long. I won't have a naked companion. Look upon this ... Tell me: Have you ever seen its like beforeT
Xantcha gathered her wits. They stood on a bare-rock plain. The sky was a cloudless pale blue; light came from an intensely white sun-star so high overhead that she thought she should have been hot and sweating. Yet the plain was cold, the wind colder. She could hear the wind and see the dust it raised. When she thought about it, Xantcha wasn't at all sure how she knew it was cold. With Urza's armor surrounding her, she felt nothing against her skin. The sensation, or lack of sensation, so intrigued her that Urza had to clear his throat twice before she saw the dragon.
"With that," he said, pride evident in his voice, "I shall destroy Phyrexia."
The dragon was dead black in the sunlight. Xantcha walked closer until she was certain that it was, indeed, made from a metal, though even when she touched a pillar- like hind leg, she couldn't say which metal. It was bipedal in structure, and her head came barely to its bent knees. Its torso, as yet unfinished, was a maze of tanks and tubes.
"Naphtha," Urza explained before she asked her question. "Phyrexians, the Phyrexians I mean to destroy, are sleeked with oil. They burn."
Xantcha nodded, recalling the Fourth Sphere lakes of slag and naphtha and the screams that sometimes arose from them. Scaffolding struts extruded from the dragon's counterbalancing tail. She seized one. Urza warned her to be careful; she had no intention of being anything else, but he'd asked a question and she meant to give him an honest answer.
The cyst-made armor moved with her however Xantcha contorted herself, even hanging by one knee to get a better look at the claws on the dragon's somewhat short arms. If its arms were short, its teeth were long and varied: sharp spikes, razor-edge wedges, rasps, and crushing anvils, all cunningly geared so that whoever sat in the Urza-sized gap between the dragon's shoulders could bring his best metal weapons to bear on a particular enemy-if a gout of flaming naphtha proved insufficient to destroy them.
More unfinished scaffolding rose above and behind the dragon's shoulders: protection, she guessed, for Urza, but possibly he intended to finish his engine with wings. She judged it little more than half finished and already heavier than anything she'd seen on the First Sphere. Perhaps he'd concocted a more potent fuel than glistening oil. Xantcha finished her exploration without finding the source of the engine's power.
After dangling from the dragon's forearm, Xantcha dropped three or four times her height. She was out of practice, hitting her chin on her knee as she absorbed the impact. Her Up should have been a bloody mess. She was pleasantly impressed with Urza's gift, but as for his dragon ...
"If you had a hundred of them-" Her voice was definitely thicker, deeper, and distant-sounding to her armor-plugged ears. "You could take one of the Fanes and hold it against the demons, but not against the Ineffable."
"You don't appreciate what this is, Xantcha. I have built a dragon ten times stronger than anything Mishra or I had during our misbegotten war. When it is finished, not even the Thran could stand against it."
Xantcha shrugged. She didn't know the Thran. "It will have to be very powerful, then, when it is finished."
"You have been blinded, Xantcha, by what they did to you, by what you can't remember, but they are not as powerful as they've made you believe. When my dragon is finished-when I've found the rest of what I need-"
"Found?" Her scavenging curiosity had been aroused. "You found this? You did not make it, as you made the bread and tool?"
"I found the materials, Xantcha, and I shaped them to my needs. To make a dragon like this, to make it as I made your bread ... even for me it would be exhausting, and in the end-" Urza lowered his voice-"not quite real."
Xantcha cocked her head.
"That bread filled your stomach and was nutritious. It would keep you alive, but you wouldn't thrive on it-at least, I don't think you would. When I was a man, I could not have thrived on it. Things that are made, whether they are made from nothing or something else, no matter how well made they are, aren't quite real. It's easier-better-to start with something similar to what you want to have at the end and change it, little by little."
"Compleat it?"
"Yes-" Urza began, then stopped suddenly and stared harshly at her, eyes a-shimmer. "No. Compleation is a Phyrexian taint. Do not use that word. Only artifacts can be made. Everything else must be born, must live and grow."
Xantcha studied her companion with equal intensity, though her eyes, of course, could not sparkle. "We were taught that the Ineffable made Phyrexia."
"Lies, Xantcha. They told you lies."
"I was told many lies," she agreed.
Urza took her wrists again.
"Until now," he said, "I have dwelt here beside my greatest artifact, but now that I have taken charge of you, I will have to have a dwelling in a more hospitable place. It is no great inconvenience. For every hospitable plane there are several out-of-the-way planes such as this. While these plains have supplied me with the ores I needed for my dragon's bones, they aren't where power-stones are to be found."
Xantcha had started to ask what a powerstone was when her armor began to tingle and Urza began to grow transparent in the stark sunlight. They were underway before Xantcha could ask where they were going, and though she'd already guessed that her image for a world was the
same as Urza's image for a plane, getting dragged from one world to the next with his hands clamped around her wrists was worse than sinking through the ambulators.
Whether her eyes were open or closed, Xantcha saw the same many-colored streaks whirling around her. Every sense, every perception was stretched to its opposite extreme and held there for what might have been a single moment or might have been eternity. The silence was deafening, the cold so intense she feared she'd melt, the viselike pressure so great she feared she'd explode. And, to complete the experience, when Urza finally released Xantcha, her clinging armor transformed abruptly into a layer of white paste.
Pushed past her limit, Xantcha gave into the panic and terror, clawing the residue as she ran blindly away from Urza. She tripped, as was inevitable, and fell hard enough to knock the wind from her. Urza knelt and touched her. The armor residue was gone in an instant.
"I tested it on myself," he explained. He helped her to her feet and laid his hands on her scrapes and bruises, healing them with gentle heat.
Xantcha had endured much in her unmeasured life, none of it gentle. She pulled away when she could and realized he'd brought her back to the place where she'd been beaten. Parting her lips, she tasted the air; the tang of glistening oil was faint, stale.
"They're gone," she said.
"And not long after I rescued you. The locals would not know the Phyrexians had ever been here. I would not have known, if I had not found them first. This is the place, the very place, where they brought you and where the last of them stood before leav-ing."