waist when she looked straight ahead; symmetric, altogether more man-shaped, though his metal "skin" didn't completely hide the glistening sinews and tubes-like a born-man's veins only filled with glistening oil- that wound over his green-gold skin. Gix's forehead was monumental and framed a rubine gem that was almost certainly a weapon. His skull seemed to have been pivoted open along his brow ridge. A black-metal serrated spike ran from the base of his neck to the now-raised base of his skull. From the side, it looked like the spike was rooted in his spine and attached to a red, blue, and yellow fish.
In another circumstance, the demon would have been ludicrous or absurd. Far beneath Avohir's altar, he was the image of malignity and horror. Xantcha stood transfixed as a narrow beam of blood-red light shone between her and Gix's bulging forehead. She felt surprise, then a command:
Obey. Listen and obey.
"Never." Urza's armor wasn't perfect protection against the demon's invasion of her mind, but added to her own stubbornness and to the walls she'd made ages ago. Xantcha defied the demon. "I'll die first."
Gix grinned, all glistening teeth and malice. "Your wish-"
He probed her mind again, brutally. Xantcha fed him images of his excoriation. The demon withdrew suddenly, his metallic chin tucked in a parody of mortal surprise.
"So old?"
Light sprang up in the portal chamber, a catacomb, with desiccated bodies heaped here and there, all male, all bearded. The Shratta, if not all of them, then at least a hundred of them, and probably their leaders. Replaced with Phyrexians or simply exterminated? Like as not, she'd never know. Whatever their crimes, Xantcha knew the Shratta would have suffered horribly before they died; that would have to suffice for Rat's vengeance.
"Yes, I remember you," Gix whispered. "One of the first, and still here?" His metal-sheathed shoulders jerked. "No. Not sent. I saved you back ... Waiting. Waiting ..." The demon's voice faded. The light in its forehead flickered. "Xantcha." He made her name long and sibilant, like a snake sliding over dried leaves. "My special one. Here ... in Dominaria?"
Before Gix had needed cables and talons to caress Xantcha chin. Now he used light and encountered Urza's armor.
"What is this?"
The light bored into her right eye, seeking Xantcha's past, her history. Defiantly, she threw out images of Urza's dragon burning through the Fourth Sphere ceiling.
"Yes. Yes, of course. Locked out of Dominaria, where else would you go? I gave you purpose and you pursued it. You pursue it still."
The light became softer. It caressed Xantcha's mind. She shivered within Urza's armor.
"I'll tell Urza that the demon who destroyed his brother has returned."
It was a guess on Xantcha's part, Ratepe had seen Gix in Mishra's Weakstone recordings, but he'd never said anything about the Phyrexians who'd undertaken Mishra's compleation. But it was a good guess.
"Yes," Gix sighed. "Tell Urza that Gix has returned. Tell him the Thran are waiting for him."
Xantcha didn't understand. The Phyrexians had fought the Thran. Her mind swirled with echoes of Urza's lectures about Koilos and a noble race that sacrificed itself for Dominaria's future.
Gix laughed. All the raucous birds and chittering insects of summer couldn't have equaled the sound. "Did he tell you that? He knows better. He was there."
The statement made no sense. Urza had found his eyes at Koilos and through them, remembered the final battle between the Thran and the Phyrexians, but he hadn't been there. Gix was toying with her, feeding on her confusion and terror, waiting for her to make the mistake that would let him into her secret places.
"You have no secrets, Xantcha." More laughter. "I made the stone the brothers broke, and I made the brothers, too, and then I made you."
"Lies," Xantcha shot back and remembered standing beside a vat. A body floated below the surface: dark haired, angular, sexless ... her. "There were a thousand of us," she shot back.
"Seven thousand, and only one like you. I looked for you ... after."
After he escaped the Seventh Sphere? "I have my own heart."
"Yes. You have done well, Xantcha. Better than I hoped. I had plans for you. I still have them. Come back. Listen and obey!"
Gix pulled a string in Xantcha's mind. She felt herself begin to unravel. Newts had no importance. Newts did what they were told. Newts listened and obeyed. She belonged with Gix, to Gix, in Phyrexia, her home. Gix would take care of her. The demon was the center. She would do as he wished.
Urza's armor was in the way....
Xantcha was about to release the armor when she thought of Ratepe. Suddenly there was nothing else except his face, laughing, scowling, watching her as she walked across the Medran plaza with a purse of gold on her belt. The sensations lasted less than a heartbeat, then Gix was back, but Xantcha hadn't needed a whole heartbeat to retreat from the destructive folly she'd been about to commit.
"So, you found him," Gix said after he'd retreated from her mind. "Does he please you?"
The red light continued to shine in her eye. Gix would pull another string, and this time there'd be no Ratepe, son of Mideah, to surprise the demon. Ratepe had given Xantcha a second chance, but she had to seize it. And Xantcha did, diving to her left, toward the corridor. Something hard and heavy struck her back. It threw her forward. She skidded face-first along the floor-stones, surrounded by red light, but the armor held. Xantcha scrambled to her feet and ran for her life. Demons weren't accustomed to defiance. They had no reflex response to stop a newt's desperate escape. Gix chased her, but he didn't catch her before she reached the spiral stairway.
He howled and clawed the stones, but the passage was too tight, too narrow. A fireball engulfed Xantcha in an acid wind. She clung to the spine until it passed, then ran
again, through the corridor, the cloister and into Avohir's sanctuary.
Night had fallen on the plaza. Xantcha wasted no time asking herself where the day had gone. She released the armor, yawned out the sphere as soon as she dared, and headed up the coast to Russiore.
CHAPTER 19
Urza and Xantcha 'walked away from Serra's realm not long after Xantcha gave him her heart. Xantcha was scarcely wiser about the imperfections of Serra's creation than she'd been when she'd walked into the palace, though it was clear that her presence, so close to the Cocoon, affected not only the realm as a whole but Sosinna's recovery from the Aegis bums. For Sosinna and Kenidiern, Xantcha would have accepted Serra's offer of transit to another, natural and inherently balanced world, but the offer was not made a second time. Urza accepted Serra's judgment. Even though he distrusted Xantcha as a Phyrexian, he'd been through too much with her to go on alone.
He held Xantcha in his arms for that first terrible step across the chasm that separated a willfully created plane from the natural multiverse. She held a sealed chest nearly filled with gifts from Lady Serra. The gifts included a miniature cocoon that was the perfect size for Xantcha's amber heart.
Their first natural world was a tiny, airless moon circling another world that appeared to be one vast blue- green ocean, though Urza said otherwise. He made a chamber beneath the moon's surface and filled it with breathable air, his usual course in a place where he could survive indefinitely but Xantcha could not.
"A terrible thing, this," he said, removing Xantcha's heart from the chest and placing it in a niche he had just finished. "I believe it contains everything they took away from you, even your soul."