Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

Battered and scarcely conscious, Xantcha had been dragged to the brink of the very same fumarole where Gix had fallen to the Seventh Sphere. One push and life would have ended for her, but Xantcha was made of flesh and the planner-priests had believed that flesh could be punished until it transformed itself. From the fumarole Xantcha was

taken to a cramped cell, where she dwelt in darkness for some small portion of eternity, sustained by memories of dancing light and music. When the priests thought she had suffered enough, they dragged her out again. The searchers had found another inscrutable artifact on another nameless world.

Xantcha was Orman'huzra. She was still useful and she had the wit-the deceit-to grovel before the various priests, begging for her life on any terms they offered. They sent her back to work never guessing that a lowly newt, mourning the loss of beauty, had declared war on Phyrexia.

The diggers suspected, but the great priests paid no more attention to diggers than they did to newts, and suspicion notwithstanding, diggers who worked with Orman'huzra lasted longer than those who didn't. As soon as she finished with one extraction, she'd find herself assigned to another team.

Thirty artifacts and twenty-two worlds after being dragged out of her cell, Xantcha's war was going well. She hadn't destroyed every artifact they sent her to unravel, but she'd lost several and rigged several more so that the next Phyrexian who touched it never touched anything again. She grew quite pleased with herself.

The diggers were already in place when Xantcha arrived, alone and nauseous from the ambulator trek, on her twenty- third world. A rattling digger made of metal and leather, all of it slick with oil that stank rather than glistened, led her into a humid cave where rows of smoky meat-fat lanterns marked the excavation.

"They might be Phyrexian," the digger said as they approached the main trench. At least, that's what Xantcha thought it had said. Its voice box worked no better than the rest of it.

Xantcha peered into the trenches, into a pair of fire- faceted eyes, each larger than her skull. She sat on her ankles, slowly absorbing what the searchers had found this time.

"They might be Phyrexian," the digger repeated.

Whatever the artifact was, it wasn't Phyrexian and neither were the ranks and rows of partially excavated specimens behind it. Phyrexians were useful. Tender-priests compleated newt-flesh according to its place in the Ineffable's plan, and then they stopped. Function was everything. These artifacts had no apparent function. They seemed, at first and second glance, to be statues: metal reproductions of the crawling insects that, like rats and buzzards, flourished everywhere, including Phyrexia. And though Xantcha had no liking for things that buzzed or stung, what she saw reminded her more of the long-destroyed wind-crystal than the digger beside her.

"I am told to ask, what will you need to secure them for bearing?"

Xantcha shook her head. Mostly the searcher-priests looked for sources of metal and oil because Phyrexia had none of its own; artifacts were a bonus, but the gems and precious metals that compleated the higher priests came to Phyrexia in the form of plunder.

It didn't take Orman'huzra to secure plunder.

There had to be more, and to find it Xantcha seized a

lantern and leapt into the trench where the stronger but far less agile digger couldn't follow. At arm's length she realized that the insects were fully articulated. Whoever made them had meant them to move. She touched a golden plate; it was as warm as her own flesh and vibrated faintly.

Forgetting the digger on the trench-rim, Xantcha ran to one of the second-rank artifacts. It, too, was warm and vibrating, but unlike the first artifact, it had a steel- toothed mouth and steel claws-as nasty as any warrior's pincers-in addition to its golden carapace. On impulse, Xantcha tried to bend the raised edge of a golden plate.

A long, segmented antenna whipped around Xantcha's arm and hurled her against the trench wall, but not before she had the answer she wanted. The plate hadn't bent. It looked like gold, but it was made from something much stronger. Xantcha had another, less wanted, answer too. The artifacts were aware, possibly sentient and at least partially powered.

"Move! Move!" the rattletrap digger shrieked from the rim, less warning or concern for a damaged companion than a reaction to the unexpected.

Sure enough a reeking handful of diggers and bearers came clattering, some through the trenches and others along the rim.

One digger, in better repair than the rest, assumed command, demanding quiet from his peers and an explanation from Orman'huzra.

"Simple enough. It moved and I didn't dodge."

A cacophony of squeaks and trills echoed through the cave, as the diggers and bearers succumbed to laughter.

The better-made digger whistled for silence. "They have not moved. They do not move."

Xantcha displayed her welted arm. Sometimes, there was no arguing with flesh. Diggers did not have articulated faces, yet the chief digger contrived a worried look.

"You will secure them," it said, a command, not a request.

"I will need wire-" Xantcha began, then hesitated as half-formed plots competed in her head.

The searchers must have known that the shiny insects were more than plunder but the diggers and bearers, despite their trench excavations, hadn't known the artifacts could move. She stared at the huge, faceted eyes, fiery in reflected lantern light. The insects weren't Phyrexian; perhaps they could be enlisted in her private war against Phyrexia, if she could get them through intact and without getting herself killed in the process.

"Strong wire," she amended. "And cloth ... thick, heavy cloth. And food ... something to eat and not reeking oil."

"Cloths?" the digger whirled its mouth parts in confusion. Only newts, gremlins and the highest strata of priests draped their bodies in cloth.

"Unmade clothes," Xantcha suggested. "Or soft leather. Something ... anything so I can cover their eyes."

The digger chattered to itself. The tender-priests could replace a newt's eyes, if its destiny called for a different sort of vision, but diggers had flesh-eyes within their immobile faces. This one had pale blue eyes that

widened slowly with comprehension.

"Diggers will find," it said, then spun its head around and issued commands to its peers in the rapid, compleat Phyrexian way that Xantcha could understand but never duplicate. Fully half of them rumbled immediately toward the cave's mouth. The chief digger turned back to Xantcha. "Orman'huzra, begin."

And she did, walking the trenches, examining the insect artifacts already excavated. Xantcha counted the golden, humming creatures that were visible. She climbed out of the trenches and measured the rest of the dig site with her eyes. The cave could easily contain an army. Xantcha hadn't been on this world long enough to know the measure of its day, but it seemed safe to think that she'd need at least a local season, maybe a local year, to get her warriors ready for their war.

Xantcha approached the golden swarm cautiously, starting with those she judged least likely to sever an arm or neck if she made a mistake-which she did several times before she learned what awakened them and what didn't. An isolated touch was more dangerous than a solid thwack to an armored underbelly, and they were much more sensitive to her flesh than to the diggers' shovel-hands.

She foresaw problems inciting her army to fight back in Phyrexia and studied the artifacts by herself, whenever rain drove all but a few diggers and bearers to the shelter beside the ambulator. Rain, especially a cold, penetrating rain, was a poorly-compleated Phyrexian's greatest enemy. The bearers would retreat all the way to Phyrexia once a storm started. Xantcha could have won her private war with just a few of the mud-swirling, gully-washing deluges that threatened the artifact cave as the world's seasons progressed.