"Enough, already!"

She moved on to the next anchor.

Ratepe arrived moments later. "Xantcha!"

"Stay away!" she warned harshly. The pain was bearable but numbness was making her groggy. She could have used help, but not from someone who was pure, mortal flesh. "It's not done. Not yet. I told you to run!"

"Xan-"

Xantcha realized she must look bad, broken bones bruising her face, her right arm, mangled and useless. "Don't worry about me.

I'll be fine in a couple of days. Just... get away from here. More can come through, even now. Make yourself unnoticeable. I've to create an inconvenience."

"I'll help-"

"You'll hide."

She popped another anchor. The pool rippled, black on black. Ratepe retreated, but not far. She didn't have the strength to argue with him.

"There, by the priest, you'll see a little black glass- circle thing. Don't touch it! Don't touch anything. But think about breaking that glass." Xantcha crawled to the next anchor.

"Priest? Shratta?"

"No." She pointed at the heap of metal that had been the Phyrexian and went back to work on the anchor. Another eight or ten, and she'd have it loose.

"Merciful Avohir! Xantcha, what is it?"

"Phyrexian. A priest. I don't know what kind, something new since I left. That's what we're fighting. Except, that's a priest and not a Phyrexian meant for fighting."

"Not like you, then-"

Xantcha looked up. He was bent over, reaching out. "I said, don't touch it!" He straightened. "And I'm not a fighter. I'm not anything, a newt, nothing started, nothing compleated. Just a newt."

"The six-I killed the last one, myself, with those coins you left me." She hadn't heard the explosions. Well,

there'd been other things on her mind. "They called this ... a priest? They invited it here, to Efuan Pincar?"

"Big trouble, just like you said. And don't kid yourself. Assume they've got more ambulators." She remembered the upright disk in the Moag temple. "Assume they've got worse. Assume that some of the sleepers are awake, that there are priests inside the palace, and that some of your own have been corrupted, starting with your king." Xantcha released another anchor. "Look at the glass, will you? My sword broke when I hit it."

A moment or two of silence. She was down to her last three anchors when Ratepe said, "I've got an idea," and ran into the trees.

He came back with the firepots and the rest of Urza's canisters. "We can put it in one of the pots with the bangers, put one pot on top of the other and let it rip."

All the anchors were up and Xantcha had no better idea, except to send Ratepe to the far end of the orchard before she followed his suggestions.

Afterward, she remembered flying through the air and landing in a tree.

CHAPTER 14

It had happened before in the between-worlds: a sensation of falling that lasted until Xantcha opened her eyes and found herself looking at nothing familiar.

"Ah, awake at last."

The voice was not quite a man's voice, yet deeper than most female voices and quite melodious, though Xantcha suspected that an acid personality powered it. She could almost picture a Phyrexian with that voice, though this place wasn't Phyrexia. Not a whiff of glistening oil accompanied the voice, and the air was quiet. There was music, in the distance, music such as might be made by glass chimes or bells.

Xantcha remembered the wind-crystal on another world.

She realized she was not in a bedroom, not in a building of any sort. The wall to her left and the ceiling above were a shallow, wind-eroded cave. Elsewhere, the world was grass. Grass with a woman's voice?

"Where am I? How did I get here? Urza? Where's Urza? We were together on the ice, fighting Phyrexians." She propped herself up on one elbow. "I have to find him." She was dizzy. Xantcha was rarely dizzy.

"As you were!"

By its tone, the voice was accustomed to obedience.

Xantcha lay flat and returned to her first question. "Where am I?"

"You are here. You are being cared for. There is nothing more you need to know."

She'd been so many places, picked up so many languages. Xantcha had to lie very still, listening to her thoughts and memories, before she could be sure she did not know the language she was speaking. It was simply there in her mind, implanted rather than acquired by listening. Another reason to think of Phyrexia.

Xantcha considered it unlucky to think of Phyrexia once before breakfast and here she'd thought of it three times. She realized she was very hungry.

"If I'm being cared for, I'd like something to eat, if you please."

Urza said manners were important among strangers, especially when one was at a stranger's mercy. Of course, he rarely bothered with such niceties. With his power, Urza was never at a stranger's mercy.

Xantcha remembered the turtles, the Phyrexians they'd been fighting before-before what? She couldn't remember how the skirmish had ended, only a bright light and a sense that she'd been falling for a long time before she woke up here, wherever here was.

"The air will sustain you," the voice said. "You do not need to fill yourself with death."

Another thought of Phyrexia, where compleat Phyrexians neither ate nor breathed but were sustained by glistening oil.

"I need food. I'll hunt it myself."

"You'll do no such thing!"

Xantcha pushed herself into a sitting position and got her first look at the voice: a tall woman, thin through the body, even thinner through the face. Her eyes were gray, her hair was pale gold, and her lips were a tight, disapproving line beneath a large, but narrow nose. She seemed young, at least to Xantcha. It seemed, as well, that she had never smiled or laughed.

"Who are you?" Xantcha asked. Though, what are you? was the question foremost in her mind.

The multiverse might well contain an infinite number of worlds, but it had no more than two-score of sentient types, if Xantcha followed Urza's example and disregarded those types that, though clearly sentient, were also completely feral and without the hope of civilization. Or nearly four-score, if she followed her own inclination to regard men and women of every type as distinct species.

Urza's type was the most common and with the arrogance of the clear majority. He called himself simply a man where others were elf-men, or dwarf-men, or gremlin-men. His wife, Kayla Bin-Kroog had been a woman, a very beautiful woman. When Xantcha had asked Urza for a single word that united men and women, as elves united elf-man and elf- woman, he'd answered mankind, which seemed to her a better way of uniting all the men, common and rare rather than common men with their wives and daughters.

When she'd demanded a better word, Urza had snarled and 'walked away. Xantcha wondered what he'd make of the woman standing in front of her. Wonder sparked a hope he was still alive, and that she'd find him here, but another thought crowded Urza from Xantcha's mind. She and the stranger were both dressed in long white gowns.

Where had her clothes gone? Her sword and knives? The shoulder sack filled with stew and treasure? Except for the gown, Xantcha was naked. She wondered if the stern-faced woman was naked, if she was really a woman after all. Her voice was quite deep, and her breasts were a far cry from generous.

That was very nearly a fifth Phyrexian thought before breakfast, and since the stranger had given no indication that she was going to answer any of her questions, Xantcha got her feet under her and pushed herself upright. Another bout of dizziness left her grateful for the nearby rock.

She rested with her back against the stone and took a measure of the world where she'd awakened. It was a golden place of rolling hills and ripened grasses, all caught in the afterglow of a brilliant sunset, with clear air and layers upon layers of clouds overhead. It was difficult, though, to discern where west lay. Urza had explained it to her in the earliest days. Wherever men dwelt, the sun set in the west and rose in the east. In all quarters the horizon was marked with dazzling amber peaks that might have been mountains or might have been clouds. It was achingly beautiful and almost as strange.