"You said I mustn't, and I obey. You should look for yourself. Now is the time-"
"Perhaps. I dare not move too soon. The land remembers; there can be no mistakes. I must have cause. I must be very careful, Xantcha. If I reveal myself too soon, I foresee disaster. We must weigh our choices carefully."
Retorts swirled in Xantcha's mind. It was never truly we with Urza, but she'd made her choices long ago. "No one will suspect, even if you used your true name and shape. There've been a score of doom-saying Urzas on the road this year alone. You've become the stuff of legends. No one would believe you're you."
A rare smile lit up her companion's face. "That bad still?"
"Worse. But please, go to Baszerat and Morvern. A quarrel has become a war. So it began with the Fallaji and the Yotians. Who knows, there might be brothers.... You've been up here too long, Urza."
Urza reached into her mind again, gathering landmarks and languages, which she willingly surrendered. Then, in a blink's time, she was back into her own proper consciousness. Urza faded into the between-worlds, which was, among other things, the fastest way to travel across the surface of a single world.
"Good luck," she wished him, then knelt down.
Crashing crockery had crushed a good many of Urza's gnats. Quicksilver had dissolved uncounted others. Yet many swirled around in confusion on the floor. Xantcha labored until midnight, gathering them into a box no deeper than her finger, but far too steep for any of them to climb. When the dirt was motionless, she took the box into the alcove where Urza stored his raw materials.
The shelves were neat. Every casket and flask was clearly labeled, albeit in a language Xantcha couldn't read. She didn't need to read labels. The flask she wanted had a unique lambent glow. It was pure phloton, distilled from fire, starlight and mana, a recipe Urza had found on the world were he'd found Xantcha. "Waste not, want not," she whispered over the seething box. The gnats blazed like fireflies as they fell through the phloton, and then were gone.
Xantcha resealed the flask and replaced it on the shelf, exactly as she'd found it, before returning to her own room. She had a plan of her own, which she'd promised herself she'd implement when the time was right. That time had come when Urza touched her hair.
If Urza couldn't see the present Phyrexian threat because he was obsessed with the past... If he couldn't care about the folk of Baszerat or Morvem because he still cared too much about what had happened to Mishra, then Xantcha figured she had to bring the past and Mishra to Urza. She had it all worked out in her mind, as much as she
ever worked anything out: find a young man who resembled Kayla's word picture, teach him the answers to Urza's guilty questions, then troll her trumped-up Mishra past Urza's eyes.
A new Mishra wouldn't cure his madness. Nothing could do that, not while those powerstone eyes were lodged in Urza's skull, but if a false Mishra could convince Urza to walk away from his worktable, that would be enough.
CHAPTER 3
Morning came to the Ohran Ridge, and found Xantcha sitting in the bottom of a transparent sphere as it drifted above springtime mountain meadows. The sphere was as big around as Xantcha was tall and had been a gift from Urza. Or more accurately, the artifact that produced it had been Urza's gift. He'd devised the cyst to preserve her as she followed him from world to world. A deliberate yawn and a mnemonic rhyme drew a protective oil out of the cyst. Depending on the rhyme, the oil expanded into the buoyant sphere or ripened into a tough, flexible armor.
Urza had taught Xantcha the rhyme for the armor. The sphere was the result of Xantcha's curiosity and improvisations. Urza complained that she'd transformed his Thran-inspired artifact into a Phyrexian abomination. The complaint, though sincere, had always perplexed Xantcha. The Thran, as Urza described them, believed that sentience and artifice must always be separate. Xantcha's cyst wasn't remotely sentient, and she supposed she could have dug it out of her stomach, but it had become part of her, no different than her arms ... or Urza's faceted eyes. Besides, if she hadn't discovered how to make her sphere, Urza would have had to provide her with food, clothing, and all the other things a flesh and blood person required, because Xantcha, though she was almost as old as Urza, was indisputably flesh and blood.
And just as indisputably Phyrexian.
Xantcha willed the sphere higher, seeking the swift wind-streams well above the mountains. She had a long journey planned, and needed strong winds if she wanted to finish it before Urza returned from the south. The sphere rose until the landscape resembled Urza's tabletop, and the sphere began to tumble.
Tumbling never bothered Xantcha. With or without the cyst, she had a strong stomach and an unshakable sense of direction. But tumbling wasted time and energy. Xantcha raised her arms level with her shoulders, one straight out in front of her, the other extended to the side; the tumbling stopped. Then she pointed both extended arms in the direction she wished to travel and rotated her hands so they were both palms up. She thought of rigging and sails, a firm hand on the tiller board, and the sphere began to move against the wind.
It was slow going at first, but before the sun had risen another two hand spans, Xantcha was scudding north faster than any horse could run. Xantcha couldn't explain how the sphere stayed aloft. It wasn't sorcery; she had no talent for calling upon the land. Urza swore it wasn't anything to do with him or his artifacts and refused to discuss the matter. Xantcha thought it was no different
than running. The whys and wherefores weren't important so long as she found what she was looking for and got home safe.
But questions lurked where Xantcha's memories began. They crept forward once the sphere was moving smartly, and there was nothing to do but think and remember.
The beginning was liquid, thick and warm as blood, dark and safe. After the liquid came light and cold, emptiness and hard edges, a dim chamber in the Fane of Flesh, the first place she'd known, a soot-stained monolith of Phyrexia's Fourth Sphere. Her beginning wasn't birth, not as Urza had been born from his mother's body. There were no mothers or fathers in the decanting chamber only metal and leather priests tending stone-gouged vats. The vat-priests of the Fane of Flesh were of no great status. Though compleat, their appliances were mere hooks and paddles and their senses were no better than the flesh they'd been decanted with. They took orders from above. In Phyrexia there was always above-or within, deeper and deeper through the eight spheres to the center where dwelt the Ineffable. He whose name was known but never spoken, lest he awaken from his blessed sleep.
Obey, the vat-priests said unnecessarily as she'd shivered and discovered her limbs. A small, warm stone fell from her hands. The vat-priests had said it was her heart and took it from her. There was a place, they said-in Phyrexia everything had a place, without place there was nothing-where hearts were kept. Her mistakes would be written on her heart, and if she made too many mistakes, the Ineffable who dwelt at Phyrexia's core would make her a part of his dreams, and that would be the end of her. Obey and learn. Pay attention. Make no mistakes. Now, follow. Later, when Xantcha had crossed more planes and visited more worlds than she could easily recount, she'd realize that there was no other place like Phyrexia. In no other world were full-grown newts, like her, decanted beside a sludge-vat. Only Phyrexian newts remembered the first opening of their eyes. Only Phyrexian newts remembered, and understood, the first words-threats- they heard. In her beginning, there was only the Fane of Flesh, and she obeyed without question, writhing across the stone floor because she hadn't the strength to walk.