Xantcha seized Ratepe's shoulder and forced him to look at her. "We either stop those men, or you make damn sure you don't survive, 'cause sleepers won't come through alone, and anything else that comes through that ambulator you don't ever want to meet."
He went bloodless pale beneath his sweat and neither nodded nor spoke.
"Understand?"
"W-what can I do?"
"They're not watching their backs. If we're lucky, we can set up the firepots, then you keep dropping Urza's toys into them, one after another."
Ratepe nodded, and Xantcha curled her fingers, raising the sphere slightly, then backing off to the far edge of the orchard, out of sight of the six men, but well within the firepots' range. She brought it down carefully. The thump of their supplies hitting the ground as the sphere collapsed wasn't loud enough to disturb the birds in the nearest trees.
Xantcha kissed Ratepe once before she yawned out a layer of armor that would make affection pointless. The firepots were tubes shaped roughly like men's boots, with the important difference that when Xantcha unlaced them, their phloton linings glowed. She aimed them from memory. Close would be good enough with the canisters they'd be using. After she'd piled the fist-sized canisters at Ratepe's feet and dumped a pair-one filled with compressed naphtha, the other with glass shards-into the rapidly heating firepots, she handed Ratepe her smaller coin pouch.
"Anyone gets too close, don't bother with your sword, just throw one of these at him and duck."
Then the firepots let loose, and it was time to draw her sword and run.
The Efuands were sword-armed but not armored. Xantcha planned to take one, maybe two, of them by surprise, and hoped that the firepots would do the same, but mostly she hoped that the Efuands would abandon the ambulator before it spat out reinforcements. The first part of her plan went well. She met a man charging through the trees, struggling to draw his sword. Xantcha slew him with a side cut across the gut. It was loud and messy but successful.
One down, five to go.
The firepots, whose trajectory was more height than distance, delivered both of Urza's exploding artifacts within twenty paces of the ambulator. They'd spooked the horses; all six had torn free and bolted, but the naphtha had fallen beyond the black pool, and the glass hadn't
disabled any of the four men-two still at work anchoring the ambulator, two with their swords drawn and coming after her-that Xantcha could see.
Two more canisters came hissing out of the morning sunlight. One fell on the rippling pool and vanished before it exploded. No time to imagine where it might have gone or what it might accomplish when it arrived. The second spread more glass shards near the two men working on the portal's rim. If she survived, Xantcha planned to tell Urza that glass shards weren't effective against Efuands. Though bloodied and clearly in pain, the pair stayed put.
Four plus one was only five. Xantcha hoped Ratepe remembered the coins. Then she put him out of her mind. The swordsmen positioned themselves between her and the other pair of Efuands. She knew what they saw: an undersized youth with an undersized sword and no apparent armor. She knew how to take advantage of mis-perception. Her arm trembled, the tip of her sword pointed at the ground, and then she ran at the nearer of the pair.
He thought he could beat her attack aside with a simple parry. That was his last mistake. The other thought he had an easy stroke across the back of her neck. He struck hard enough to drop Xantcha to one knee, but he'd been expecting more and failed to press what little advantage he had. Xantcha pivoted on her knee, got her weight behind the hilt, and thrust the blade up through his stomach to his heart.
She left her sword in the corpse and took up his instead. Of the two remaining Efuands, one was on his knees fussing with the ambulator while the other stood guard over him. Black on black patterns flowed across the portal's surface. Xantcha didn't dare run across it.
She could smell Phyrexia as the Efuand beat aside her first attack. He was the best of the men she'd faced so far and respectful. He stayed calm and balanced behind his sword, not in any hurry. Xantcha was in a hurry, and led with her empty, off-weapon hand, seizing his sword midway down the blade. It was a risky move. Urza's armor couldn't make her bigger or heavier than she naturally was. She couldn't always maintain her grip, and more than once she'd wound up with a dislocated shoulder.
This time, surprise and luck were with her, at least long enough to plunge her sword in the swordsman's gut before she shoved him backward, off the blade and into the black pool. She kicked the kneeling Efuand in the chin, not a crippling, much less a killing blow, except that he, too, fell backward, into the now seething ambulator.
Two more exploding artifacts arrived. One was simply loud and hurled her backward, away from the ambulator, but still the last direction she wanted to move. The other was fire that spread evenly across the black surface.
Xantcha staggered back to the place where the last Efuand had been kneeling, the place where she expected to find a palm-sized panel with seven black jewels. The priests had changed the design. There was neither panel nor jewels. In their place Xantcha saw a smooth black stone, like Urza's magnifying lens, or like the ambulator itself. The fire still burnt. Nothing had emerged. She brought her sword down on the stone.
The sword shattered.
The fire vanished as if someone had inhaled it.
And the black on black patterns had turned silver.
"Run, Ratepe!" she shouted as loud as the armor permitted, and ignored her own advice.
A Phyrexian emerged from the black pool moments later. It was a priest of some sort. There was too much metal, all of it articulated, for it to be anything less than a searcher, definitely not the scrap-made tender or teacher Xantcha had expected with a band of sleepers. It had a triangular head with faceted eyes, a bit like Urza's gemstone eyes, though large enough that she couldn't have covered one with splayed fingers. The design needed improvement. The priest raised a nozzle-tipped arm and exterminated a flying bird an instant after it was fully erupted, but ignored Xantcha who crouched unmoving some three paces from the ambulator's edge.
The nozzle arm was also new to Xantcha. She thought she'd seen a thin black thread reach out to the bird, but the attack had been so quick that she couldn't be sure of anything except the bird had disappeared in a burst of red light. Nothing, not even a feather, had fallen from the sky.
No doubt Xantcha would find out exactly what it could do, and since the priest's arms were mismatched, what surprises lurked on its right side. Urza's armor had never failed.
"Over here, meatling!" Few epithets would get a priest's attention quicker than calling it a newt. Xantcha stood up, brandishing her broken sword.
The nozzle weapon sent something very sharp, very hot at the hollow of Xantcha's neck, and she felt as though it had come out through her spine. Urza's armor flashed a radiant cobalt blue, astonishing both her and the priest.
"What is your place?" the priest demanded through mouth-parts hidden within its triangle head. It was not an avenger, modeled after fleshly predators, it was, despite its weapons, a thinker, a planner. "Xantcha."
The right arm came up and shot forth a segmented cable, the tip of which was a fast-spinning flower with razored petals. It struck Xantcha's face. She felt bones give, but the flower took greater damage. Steel petals clattered to the ground, and pulses of glistening oil spurted from the still-spinning hub. Xantcha struck quickly with the broken sword, enveloping the cable and yanked hard. It had two metal legs and a top-heavy torso. In the Phyrexia she remembered, such bipedal priests had a tendency to topple.