Urza scuffed the ground with his boot. There was nothing visibly different, but movement released the scent of glistening oil to the air.
"It is a familiar place for you, isn't it? You lived here, found food here. Conquer your nightmares, Xantcha. The Phyrexians will not return. They are cowards, Xantcha; they only prey upon the weak. They grasped my brother, but they never came to me. They know me, Xantcha, and they will not return. This will be the place where you can dwell while I complete my dragon, the place where you can lay out your wretched memories for my understanding."
Xantcha tried to understand her new companion and failed. He was wrong, simply wrong, about so many things, yet he had the power to walk between worlds. No Phyrexian, not even a demon like Gix, could do that. Urza did not give orders, not in a Phyrexian sense. Still, Xantcha had no alternative but to obey him as she'd obeyed Gix, silently and without grace. She started up the path to the caves.
"Where are you going?"
Let him haul her back; he had that power. Or let him follow, which he did.
The cave was sealed, of course, and carefully, with stones, dirt, and plant life. The locals, as Urza had called them, wouldn't know the treasures of their ancestors had been plundered, but Xantcha knew. She began pulling weeds and hurling dirt with her bare hands.
Urza intervened. "Child, what are you doing?"
"I'm not a child," she reminded him. "They brought me
here to extract an army. If it's gone, then you may be right that no Phyrexian will return. If it's not..." Xantcha went back to work.
"You'll be digging forever," Urza pulled her aside. "There are better ways."
For a moment, Urza stood stock-still with his eyes closed. When he opened them, they blazed with crimson light. A swirling cloud, about twice his height, bloomed in the air before the cave's sealed mouth. He spoke a single word whose meaning, if it had any, Xantcha didn't know, and the cloud rooted itself where she had been digging.
Fascinated, Xantcha attempted to put her hand in the small, bright windstorm. Urza touched her arm, and she could not move.
"We will come back tomorrow and see what is to be seen. Meanwhile, we will find food-it has been too long since I have enjoyed a meal-and you will begin telling me everything you remember."
Urza took Xantcha's wrists and pulled her into the between- worlds before she could recite her armor-releasing rhyme. The journey lasted less than a heartbeat, less than an airless breath. They emerged in what Urza called a town, where Xantcha found herself surrounded by born-folk: all flesh, like her, all different, too, and chattering a language she couldn't understand. He took her to an inn, gave orders in the born-folk language, told her to sit in a chair as he did, to drink from a cup and to use a knife and fork rather than her fingers when she ate.
It was difficult, but Urza was adamant. Xantcha ate until the knife, at least, was comfortable in her hands.
Later, there was music, exactly as Xantcha had dreamed it would be, and dancing which she would have joined if Urza had not said:
"Too soon, child. Your eyes are open, but you do not truly see."
When the music and dancing had ended, Urza led her from the inn to the night and through the between-worlds to the forest. He was gone when Xantcha awoke, long after sunrise. The scent of glistening oil was stronger, wafting down from the cave. She remembered the knife and wished she still had it in her hand, even though it would have been useless against a Phyrexian ... or Urza.
Urza was inside the cave, and so were most of the artifacts. Tiptoeing to the brink of an excavation trench, Xantcha watched Urza dismantle one of the insect warriors. He was faster and more powerful. When its mandible claws closed over his ankle, they shattered. Antennae whips burned and melted when they touched his face.
Perhaps one dragon would be enough, if it was Urza's dragon, with Urza sitting between its shoulders.
Xantcha cleared her throat. "They're coming back. They wouldn't have left all this behind. Waste not, want not, that's our way."
Urza leapt into the air and hovered in front of her. "The Phy-rexian way is not your way, Xantcha, not anymore, but otherwise, yes, I believe you're right. I'm ready for them tomorrow, though let us hope it isn't so soon. With time to study these automata, I'll be more than ready for them, Xantcha. These could almost be Thran design. They're pure artifice, no sentience at all, but perfectly adaptive.
Look!" He held up a pearlescent ring. "A powerstone that isn't a powerstone. There is water in here, light, and simple mana, the essence of all things. I shall call it phloton, because it burns without consuming itself. It will give me power for my dragon! More power than I ever dreamed! I shall redesign it!
"Vengeance, Xantcha. I shall take vengeance for both of us. When the Phyrexians return, I will destroy them and pursue them all the way back to Phyrexia itself."
CHAPTER 10
Urza got his wish. The Phyrexians didn't return to the cave the next day, or the next after that. Seasons passed, and years. He dismantled the insect warriors, incorporating their parts into his redesigned dragon, linking their ring- shaped hearts into a single great power source.
Ten years passed, ten Domination years, according to Urza who claimed his attachment to his birth-world remained so strong that at any time he knew the sun's angle and the moon's phase above the cave he called Koilos, the Secret Heart.
"Come," Urza said one winter morning when Xantcha would have preferred to remain in her nest of pillows and blankets. "It is finished."
He held out his hand and, with a rhyme and a yawn, Xantcha clasped it. No more screaming through the between- worlds. She'd mastered her fears and the cyst in her stomach. Although she dwelt mostly in the forest where the Phyrexian portal had been laid out and where a cottage with a chicken coop and garden now stood Urza had insisted that she accompany him to every new world he discovered. Her nose for Phyrexians was indisputably better than his.
There were no Phyrexians on the world where Urza had built and rebuilt his dragon. There was no life at all and never had been. Una's new dragon wasn't much taller than the old one, but he'd borrowed from the insect-warriors. The new dragon had a spider's eight-legged body. Any two of the eight legs could be the "front" legs, and any three could be destroyed without unbalancing it.
The many-toothed head remained from the dragon's previous incarnation, but the short arms had been lengthened, and the torso rotated freely behind whichever pair of legs led the rest. In addition to gouts of blazing naphtha, the new dragon spat lightning bolts and spheres of exploding fire.
"Phloton," Urza said, rubbing his hands together. "Unlimited power!"
Urza demonstrated each weapon, and though Xantcha still thought a hundred lesser war machines would be more effective, she was awed by the destruction Urza's new dragon brought to the barren, defenseless world. The sky was streaked with soot and dust. Slag lakes of amber and crimson pocked the plains. Everything that wasn't molten had been charred. It reminded her of nothing more or less than Phyrexia's Fourth Sphere, and she didn't think even a demon could stand against it. There was only one not-sosmall problem.
"It's too big. It won't fit through an ambulator." "It won't need an ambulator. It can walk the planes directly.
Even you could guide it safely." "I wouldn't know where to go."
Xantcha had conquered her fears, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't orient herself in the between- worlds emptiness. Worlds-planes-didn't call out to her the way they called out to Urza. If she lost her grip on Urza's hand, she fell like a stone to whatever world would have her. Urza's armor kept her alive through one failure after another, until Urza conceded that she'd never 'walk the planes.