CHAPTER 17

Xantcha awoke with her butt on the ground and her back against an apple tree's broken trunk. Torn branches with upside-down leaves blocked her view of the world. There were green apples piled in her lap and the crook of her throbbing arm. The portal explosion had thrown her so hard she'd shattered a tree when she fell, but Urza's armor had kept her whole.

Ratepe stood among the branches, looking anxious, but not at her.

"How long was I out?" she asked, reaching for the waterskin he dangled with her good arm.

"A bit..."

He dropped the waterskin in her lap. Whatever had his attention wasn't letting it go. She pulled the cork with her teeth and took a swallow before asking:

"What's out there?"

"He came out of nowhere, as soon as you'd fallen. His eyes blazed lightning and fire."

Xantcha imagined the worst. "Another Phyrexian?"

She tried to stand but armor or no armor, Phyrexian or no Phyrexian, she'd taken a beating, and her body wasn't ready for anything. Latching onto the hem of Ratepe's tunic, Xantcha dragged herself upright.

The awe-inspiring invader had been Urza, not another Phyrex-ian. Garbed in stiff armor and looking like a painted statue, he contemplated the metal-and-oil wreckage. He carried an ornate staff, the source of the lightning web that ebbed and flowed around him. Xantcha thought Urza had lost that staff ages ago when they were dodging Phyrexian ambushes. She wasn't entirely pleased to see it again.

Her battered arm wanted out of the armor. Xantcha would have preferred to wait until she had a better sense of Urza's mood, but there wasn't time for that. She silently recited the mnemonic that dissolved the armor. Her arm swelled immediately.

"Has he said anything?" she asked.

"Not a word. The way he looked, I got out of his way. Might've been better if there had been another Phyrexian for him to fry?"

"Might've," Xantcha agreed.

If there'd been an upright Phyrexian in the vicinity, Urza would have had another target besides her. She couldn't remember the last time he'd come charging to her rescue. In point of fact, she didn't think he had come to

her rescue. Since they'd gotten to Dominaria, Xantcha's heart had sat gathering dust on a shelf in Urza's alcove. She didn't think Urza had given it a second thought in over a century, but she wasn't surprised that he'd been watching it closely while she and Ratepe were away. She imagined it had flashed when she hit the tree.

Best get it over with, she decided and said to Ratepe, "You wait here," though there was no chance that he'd pay attention, and she was grateful for the help clambering through the tangled branches.

"Been a long time since I've seen a compleat one," she said casually, starting the conversation in the middle, which was sometimes the best way when Urza was rigid and wrapped in power.

"You should have known better than to engage a Phyrexian with my brother beside you!"

Urza was angry. His eyes were fire, his breath sulfur smoke and sparks. Xantcha winced when they landed on her face. He either hadn't noticed-or didn't care-that she wasn't encased in his armor. She was groping for the words that would calm him when Ratepe spoke up.

"This was my idea. We wouldn't have gotten into trouble if I hadn't badgered her into tracking the riders away from Tabarna's palace."

Urza turned without moving. "Palace?" He'd followed her heart between-worlds and didn't know where, precisely, they were.

"Pincar City's a short, hard ride for six men on good horses," Xantcha said and pointed northwest. "We spotted the riders going out a sea gate at sunrise. It was my decision to get involved when I saw them laying down an ambulator's nether end."

"An ambulator, here?"

Urza turned his head, looking for one. He was in the here and now again. Xantcha relaxed.

"We blew it up in the firepots. They had the nether end here. I sure didn't want to go through to get the prime, and I didn't want to risk carrying a loose nether around with me, especially not after what came out. I swear I was expecting sleepers and, at the outside, a tender-priest. Nothing like this."

Urza rolled the wreckage with his staff. Bright, compound eyes lopked up at the sun, metal parts clattered, and Ratepe leapt a foot in the air, thinking it was still alive.

"They've sent a demon," Urza mused, slipping out of Efuand, into his oldest language, pure ancient Argivian.

"Not a demon," Xantcha corrected, sticking with Efuand. "Some new kind of priest. Not as bad as a demon, but pretty bad when you were expecting a cadre of sleepers."

"How do you know what it was if you've never seen it before?" Ratepe asked. A reasonable question, though Xantcha wished he hadn't been staring at Urza's eyes as he asked it.

"Yes," Urza added, back to Efuand. "How can you be sure?" He tipped his staff toward one of the two Efuand corpses lying near the Phyrexian. "Are they sleepers? They have the smell of Phyrexia around them."

Xantcha swallowed her shock. Urza had long admitted that she was better at scenting out Phyrexians, but he'd

never hinted how much better, and she'd never tried to put the distinctions into words, any words from any language, including Phyrexian. "This is a priest-" she nudged the wreckage with her foot-"because it looks like a priest."

"That's not an answer," Ratepe chided.

"I'm not finished!"

Xantcha got on her knees and with her good hand attempted to loosen the Phyrexian's triangular face-plate. It was a struggle. The tenders had compleated it carefully, and it had recently received a generous allocation of glistening oil to bind what remained of its flesh to its metal carapace. Once she'd got her fingertips under one sharp corner, Ratepe helped her pry it off.

Shredded leather clung to the interior of the plate, matching the shreds of a skinless but still recognizably childish face that it had covered.

"It had compleated eyes," Xantcha explained, indicating the coiled wires emerging from the empty sockets. "Only the higher priests and warriors have compleat eyes. And it had an articulated mouth; that's definitely priest-compleat. Diggers and such, they just have boxes in their chests. And all the metal's the same, not scraps. That's priest- compleat, too. It's got no guts, just an oil bladder. A priest's got muscles and nerves, compleated, of course, joined with gears and wire, but it's got the brain it was decanted with. The brain makes it go. That's why most Phyrexians have two arms, two legs, its brain knows two arms, two legs-"

"You said they weren't flesh," Ratepe interrupted, a bit breathless and green-cheeked. He'd told her once that he hadn't been able to help with the butchering on his family's farm. Probably he wished he hadn't helped her now.

"This isn't flesh." She tore off a shredded bit. Not surprisingly, he wouldn't take it from her hand, but Urza did. "This is what flesh becomes when it is compleated."

"They start with a living man and transform him into this," Urza's voice was flat and cold as he ground the shred between his fingers.

"They start with a newt," Xantcha said flatly.

"So, this is what would have happened to ..." Ratepe couldn't finish his thought aloud.

"If I'd been destined to become a priest."

She could remember the Xantcha who'd waited, hope against hope, for the tender-priests to come for her. Would she have been happier if they had? There was no Phyrexian word for happiness.

"And my brother?" Urza flicked the shred into the weeds. "Did he become a priest? Is that what I fought in Argoth? His skin had been stretched over metal plates, over coiled wire. What was he?"