Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

Letting go of his sleeve with one hand but not the other, she reached for the lump. Urza swung it beyond her reach.

"You must understand, Xantcha, as much as you can understand anything. This is not bread to be wolfed down like a starving animal. This is an artifact. When you swallow it, it will settle in your stomach and harden into a cyst, a sort of stone that will remain there for as long as you live. Then, whenever we travel between planes or dwell on a plane where you could not otherwise survive, you

will say a little rhyme that I shall teach you and yawn mightily at its end. The cyst will release an armor that will cover you completely to keep you alive."

"You will compleat me?"

Urza glowered. Xantcha felt him pursuing her thoughts, her suspicions about the cyst. He rummaged through her memories, yanking on them as if they were the loose ends of a stubborn knot. Did he believe Orman'huzra knew nothing about artifacts? She retreated into her private self.

He sensed her escape. She saw the questions and displeasure on his face. Urza wasn't flesh, no more than Gix, but he had the habits of flesh and all the subtlety of a freshly decanted newt.

"Like a rabbit flees into the brush," he said, and looked beyond the chamber. Tears leaked from Urza's eyes, especially his left eye. Then he shuddered, and the tear tracks vanished. "No, I don't compleat. That is abomination. My artifact will be inside you, because that is the best place for it, but is a tool, nothing more and never a part of you. Never! I cannot erase the memories of Phyrexia from your mind-and would not, because they will prove useful to my vengeance-but you are no longer Phyrexian, and you must not think of Phyrexian abominations."

"Artifacts are tools," she recited as she would have once recited to the teacher-priests. A tool that she would swallow, but that would remain in her belly forever but without becoming a part of her. It wasn't reasonable, but reason wasn't important to a Phyrexian, and she would be Phyrexian forever.

Urza let the lump flow into her hand. It was cold and clinging. Xantcha's stomach churned in protest. Gagging, she lost her grip on Urza's sleeve and nearly dropped the artifact as well.

"Swallow it whole. Don't chew on it!"

"Waste not, want not," Xantcha muttered. "Waste not, want not."

She raised her hand to her mouth and nearly fainted. She tried again, breathing out as she raised her hand. The artifact quivered and darkened. Then she closed her eyes and slurped it down without inhaling. It stuck in her throat. She slapped her hands over her lips, fighting the instinct to spit the lump across the chamber.

For something that was only a tool, Urza's artifact felt alive as it oozed down Xantcha's throat, got comfortable in her gut, and hardened into a stone. She was on her knees, banging her forehead on the floor when the horrifying process finally stopped.

"See? All over. Nothing to it."

She rested her head on the floor another moment before pushing herself upright.

"I'm ready."

Her voice felt different. The artifact had deposited a trail as it had moved down her throat. It still clung to her teeth and tongue. She coughed into her hand and studied drops of spittle that glistened briefly then turned to white powder. Urza taught her the rhyme that would release the cyst's power. Pressure built in her gut as she repeated it. The yawn that followed was involuntary, and the sensation of an oily liquid surging from within, covering

her completely within two heartbeats, would have driven her to hysteria if it had lasted for a third.

Urza clutched her wrists. The cyst's liquid-her armor- tingled. He began to fade and, looking down, Xantcha saw herself fading as well.

She'd barely begun to scream when her substance was restored, covered by clothing less fine than Urza's, but finer than the rags she'd known all her life. Tempted to fondle the dark blue sleeve, she discovered it was illusion, visible but intangible.

"Later," Urza assured her. "Not long. I won't have a naked companion. Look upon this ... Tell me: Have you ever seen its like beforeT

Xantcha gathered her wits. They stood on a bare-rock plain. The sky was a cloudless pale blue; light came from an intensely white sun-star so high overhead that she thought she should have been hot and sweating. Yet the plain was cold, the wind colder. She could hear the wind and see the dust it raised. When she thought about it, Xantcha wasn't at all sure how she knew it was cold. With Urza's armor surrounding her, she felt nothing against her skin. The sensation, or lack of sensation, so intrigued her that Urza had to clear his throat twice before she saw the dragon.

"With that," he said, pride evident in his voice, "I shall destroy Phyrexia."

The dragon was dead black in the sunlight. Xantcha walked closer until she was certain that it was, indeed, made from a metal, though even when she touched a pillar- like hind leg, she couldn't say which metal. It was bipedal in structure, and her head came barely to its bent knees. Its torso, as yet unfinished, was a maze of tanks and tubes.

"Naphtha," Urza explained before she asked her question. "Phyrexians, the Phyrexians I mean to destroy, are sleeked with oil. They burn."

Xantcha nodded, recalling the Fourth Sphere lakes of slag and naphtha and the screams that sometimes arose from them. Scaffolding struts extruded from the dragon's counterbalancing tail. She seized one. Urza warned her to be careful; she had no intention of being anything else, but he'd asked a question and she meant to give him an honest answer.

The cyst-made armor moved with her however Xantcha contorted herself, even hanging by one knee to get a better look at the claws on the dragon's somewhat short arms. If its arms were short, its teeth were long and varied: sharp spikes, razor-edge wedges, rasps, and crushing anvils, all cunningly geared so that whoever sat in the Urza-sized gap between the dragon's shoulders could bring his best metal weapons to bear on a particular enemy-if a gout of flaming naphtha proved insufficient to destroy them.

More unfinished scaffolding rose above and behind the dragon's shoulders: protection, she guessed, for Urza, but possibly he intended to finish his engine with wings. She judged it little more than half finished and already heavier than anything she'd seen on the First Sphere. Perhaps he'd concocted a more potent fuel than glistening oil. Xantcha finished her exploration without finding the source of the engine's power.

After dangling from the dragon's forearm, Xantcha dropped three or four times her height. She was out of practice, hitting her chin on her knee as she absorbed the impact. Her Up should have been a bloody mess. She was pleasantly impressed with Urza's gift, but as for his dragon ...

"If you had a hundred of them-" Her voice was definitely thicker, deeper, and distant-sounding to her armor-plugged ears. "You could take one of the Fanes and hold it against the demons, but not against the Ineffable."

"You don't appreciate what this is, Xantcha. I have built a dragon ten times stronger than anything Mishra or I had during our misbegotten war. When it is finished, not even the Thran could stand against it."

Xantcha shrugged. She didn't know the Thran. "It will have to be very powerful, then, when it is finished."

"You have been blinded, Xantcha, by what they did to you, by what you can't remember, but they are not as powerful as they've made you believe. When my dragon is finished-when I've found the rest of what I need-"

"Found?" Her scavenging curiosity had been aroused. "You found this? You did not make it, as you made the bread and tool?"

"I found the materials, Xantcha, and I shaped them to my needs. To make a dragon like this, to make it as I made your bread ... even for me it would be exhausting, and in the end-" Urza lowered his voice-"not quite real."