When she'd dwelt in Phyrexia, before she'd known the meaning of silence, Xantcha had been able to ignore the furnace roar. She reached within herself to remember the trick and realized she'd been gone from Phyrexia several times longer than she'd been a part of it. But the memory was there. Xantcha numbed herself to the ambient rumbling and heard the clanging alarms.
She smiled. Those alarms were struck when a furnace was about to blow. Every Phyrexian had an emergency place, and for newts that place was the Fane of Flesh, precisely where she wanted to go. Of course, the emergency wasn't a furnace, and the closer she got to the sprawled hulks of furnaces, fanes, and gremlin shanties, the clearer it was that in the absence of the expected disaster, panic had replaced plan.
Priests and other compleated types that Xantcha didn't remember, and possibly, had never seen, raced through gremlin town. Their voices were shrill enough to hurt. The challenge was staying out of their way; the shambles were already littered with gremlins who'd failed.
Urza's armor protected Xantcha from the sky; her sense of purpose did the rest. The Fane of Flesh wasn't the most impressive structure in the Fourth Sphere, but it stood near the glistening oil fountain, which had become a spire of blue-white flame.
A phalanx of demons made their appearance while Xantcha threaded her way through the maze of furnaces. Narrow beams of amber and orange shot upward from their torsos, into the reddest clouds. Urza answered with lightning. In the Fourth Sphere's filthy skies, the air itself ignited and a web of fire shot to every part of the horizon. Xantcha felt the heat through her armor. Her instinct was to run, but ash quickly followed the fire, and the Fourth Sphere went dark.
For a moment, flesh had the advantage over metal, at least flesh protected by Urza's armor. Neither ash nor smoke irritated Xantcha's eyes, and with a bit of effort she could see a body's length in front of her. As in the gremlin town alleys, the danger came from the panicked and the fallen: no one paid any attention to a stray newt, assuming they could see her.
Then the demons regrouped. A low humming sound began in the distance, followed by a cold wind that scoured the air. As it passed overhead, Xantcha looked up and saw the bottom of the Third Sphere, a sight she'd never seen before. She
saw the flames, too, where Urza had burnt through the outer spheres. Another few moments and Xantcha might have seen Urza's dragon, if she hadn't started to run for the Fane.
The rusty doors on the far side of the Glistening Fountain were wide open as Xantcha entered the plaza where newts were compleated. She was in the final sprint for the Fane, when a vast shadow moved overhead. The last time Xantcha had seen Urza's new dragon, she hadn't noticed any wing struts and had assumed the artifact had grown too heavy for flight. She'd assumed incorrectly. Six of the dragon's eight legs supported wings that dwarfed the rest of its body and yet were highly flexible and maneuverable. The dragon swooped sideways to avoid a demon-flung bolt while belching a tongue of flame.
A furnace exploded. Metal shards and slag traced brilliant arcs beneath the Third Sphere ceiling. Impressed by beauty that was also terrifying and deadly, Xantcha considered the possibility that Urza would win. Then a tree-sized clot of slag crashed into the plaza. The flames of the Glistening Fountain sputtered and died while yellow fumes rose from the new crater beside it. Unless Xantcha wanted to die with Phyrexia, she had to find her heart and unroll the ambulator while there was still a solid place left to support the prime end.
Xantcha finished her run with no further distractions.
"Down! Go down!" a jittery vat-priest insisted as soon as she cleared the open doors. "Newts go down!" Its hooks and paddles clattered against each other as it indicated a deserted corridor.
The priests weren't flesh, but they weren't mindless artifacts, either. They might lack sufficient imagination to disobey a fatal command, but they had enough to be afraid.
"I go," Xantcha replied, the first time she'd spoken Phyrexian in centuries. She bungled the pronunciation; the priest didn't seem to notice.
She'd forgotten how big the Fane was. Maybe she'd never noticed; she'd never gone anywhere within it without a cadre of other newts and priests surrounding her. One corridor was as good as another when she had no idea where her heart might be, and the one the vat-priest had pointed toward was the broadest and best lit. She read the glyph inscriptions on the walls, hoping they would provide a clue, but they were only exhortations, lies, and empty promises, like everything else in Phyrexia.
The Fane of Flesh was quieter, cleaner than anything beyond its precincts. Its walls had, so far, resisted the outside flames. But it had taken damage. Turning a corner, Xantcha came upon a pile of rubble from a collapsed ceiling and a defunct vat-priest crushed beneath it. She wrenched one of the priest's long hooks from its shoulder socket and kept going.
A teacher-priest waited at another corner. Its eyes were flesh within a flat, bronze mask. They darted between the hook, Xantcha's face, her boots and her belt. "Newt?" it asked.
Xantcha had taken the hook as a weapon, but the priest assumed it was part of her, that it and her leather garments, were evidence that she'd begun her compleation.
"The hearts. Where are the hearts? I am sent to guard
the hearts."
Flesh eyes blinked stupidly. "Hearts? What matter the hearts?"
"We are attacked; they are the future. I am sent to guard them."
"Who sent you?" it asked after another moment's hesitation.
"A demon," Xantcha replied. Small lies weren't worth the effort of defending them. "Where are the hearts? "
The teacher-priest continued to blink. Xantcha feared it didn't know where the hearts were stored, not a confession one priest would want to make to another, especially another under a demon's command. It asked, "Which demon?" as thunder waves pummeled the Fane and rust rained from the ceiling.
Xantcha had no time to wonder whether the strike was for Urza or against him. Gix was dead, thrust through a fumarole centuries ago. Still, any answer was better than none.
"The Great Gix sent me."
Her bluff worked. The teacher-priest just needed a name. It quaked as it gave her detailed directions to a vault so far beneath the Fourth Sphere floor it might actually have been on the Fifth. More blasts shook the Fane. A stairway she was supposed to use was clogged with debris and the scent of fire.
"I'll have to tell Urza that he's wrong," Xantcha complained as she put her hand on the portal artifact tucked beneath her belt. "I wouldn't be standing here, waiting to die, if I didn't have some damn fool useless imagination."
She could have gotten out. The corridor was wide enough to unroll the portal. She'd be back in the forest. Safe. Or not safe. Ambulators could only be rolled up from their prime end. If she left the ambulator's prime end here in the corridor and the Fane collapsed, the rubble might follow her to the forest ... all of Phyrexia might follow her.
Waste not, want not! I never thought of that.
When she used the ambulator to escape, it would be a three-step process: first to the forest to anchor the nether end, back to Phyrexia to loosen the prime, and then another passage back to the forest. Timing had become even more critical.
Xantcha looked around for an intact stairway. She found one and found the vault, too. Measured by the world she'd left, Xantcha guessed she'd spent a morning in Phyrexia. Looking down at the mass of softly glowing hearts, she guessed it might take a lifetime to find her own.