Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

The Fane of Flesh was quieter, cleaner than anything beyond its precincts. Its walls had, so far, resisted the outside flames. But it had taken damage. Turning a corner, Xantcha came upon a pile of rubble from a collapsed ceiling and a defunct vat-priest crushed beneath it. She wrenched one of the priest's long hooks from its shoulder socket and kept going.

A teacher-priest waited at another corner. Its eyes were flesh within a flat, bronze mask. They darted between the hook, Xantcha's face, her boots and her belt. "Newt?" it asked.

Xantcha had taken the hook as a weapon, but the priest assumed it was part of her, that it and her leather garments, were evidence that she'd begun her compleation.

"The hearts. Where are the hearts? I am sent to guard

the hearts."

Flesh eyes blinked stupidly. "Hearts? What matter the hearts?"

"We are attacked; they are the future. I am sent to guard them."

"Who sent you?" it asked after another moment's hesitation.

"A demon," Xantcha replied. Small lies weren't worth the effort of defending them. "Where are the hearts? "

The teacher-priest continued to blink. Xantcha feared it didn't know where the hearts were stored, not a confession one priest would want to make to another, especially another under a demon's command. It asked, "Which demon?" as thunder waves pummeled the Fane and rust rained from the ceiling.

Xantcha had no time to wonder whether the strike was for Urza or against him. Gix was dead, thrust through a fumarole centuries ago. Still, any answer was better than none.

"The Great Gix sent me."

Her bluff worked. The teacher-priest just needed a name. It quaked as it gave her detailed directions to a vault so far beneath the Fourth Sphere floor it might actually have been on the Fifth. More blasts shook the Fane. A stairway she was supposed to use was clogged with debris and the scent of fire.

"I'll have to tell Urza that he's wrong," Xantcha complained as she put her hand on the portal artifact tucked beneath her belt. "I wouldn't be standing here, waiting to die, if I didn't have some damn fool useless imagination."

She could have gotten out. The corridor was wide enough to unroll the portal. She'd be back in the forest. Safe. Or not safe. Ambulators could only be rolled up from their prime end. If she left the ambulator's prime end here in the corridor and the Fane collapsed, the rubble might follow her to the forest ... all of Phyrexia might follow her.

Waste not, want not! I never thought of that.

When she used the ambulator to escape, it would be a three-step process: first to the forest to anchor the nether end, back to Phyrexia to loosen the prime, and then another passage back to the forest. Timing had become even more critical.

Xantcha looked around for an intact stairway. She found one and found the vault, too. Measured by the world she'd left, Xantcha guessed she'd spent a morning in Phyrexia. Looking down at the mass of softly glowing hearts, she guessed it might take a lifetime to find her own.

The Ineffable's plan for Phyrexia was precise, even rigid, but the plan didn't cover every contingency. Vat- priests dutifully brought newt hearts to the vault, then simply heaved the little stones into a pit, one for every newt ever decanted. At the surface the pit was about twice the size of an unrolled ambulator. When she thrust the vatpriest's hook into the chaos, it went in all the way to the shoulder gears without striking anything solid.

The pit seethed. Countless glowing amber fists and a smaller number of dark ones were vibrating constantly against one another. On her knees, Xantcha could hear a

steady chorus of sighs and gasps. She wondered about the dark ones and got lucky. She heard a pop! right in front of her, then watched as a glowing heart brightened, then went dark.

Death?

Phyrexians were dying in Urza's assault. Were their hearts, long detached from their compleated bodies, going dark as they did? Xantcha retrieved the newly darkened stone with the vat-priest's hook. Tiny scratches marred its surface: marks left as the heart stone clattered against its companions or a record of errors made by the Ineffable? She read the glyphs on the walls. They repeated the familiar teacher-priest lies.

Xantcha picked up a glowing stone. Its warmth and subtlety was tangible even through Urza's armor. She picked up a second glowing heart and found it just as warm, just as subtle, yet also different. But every dark stone felt as inert as the first she had touched.

The teacher-priests might not have told the whole truth, but they'd told enough. There was a vital bond between Phyrexians and their detached hearts. She hadn't been a total fool. There was good reason to rescue the stone she'd carried out of the vats.

And precious little hope of finding it among all the others.

Tears of frustration rolled down Xantcha's armored cheeks. They fumed when they landed on the glowing stones cradled in her lap. Another shudder rocked the Fane. When it ended, a score of hearts had popped and dimmed. More Phyrexian deaths to Urza's credit, but imagine what his dragon engine could do if Urza brought its weapons to bear where Xantcha sat. Imagine what she could do. The hearts weren't so hard that she couldn't break them, and if her tears could make the stones fume, what might her blood do if she chose to sacrifice herself for vengeance?

She'd been willing to die for much less before Urza rescued her, but she'd come to the Fane of Flesh because she wanted to live.

Choices and questions, all of them morbid, paralyzed Xantcha at the edge of the pit, and then she heard laughter. She scrambled to her feet, scattering hearts, crushing them in her frantic clumsiness. There was no one behind her. The laughter hadn't come from the corridor, it came from within ... within her mind and within her heart.

Throwing the hook aside, Xantcha waded in the pit, sweeping her open hands in front of her, moving toward the laughter. She found what she was looking for not far below the surface, neither in the middle nor at the pit's edge. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other heart stone-a few scratches, but no more than any other stone she'd touched, glowing or dark. Yet it was hers; it had to be hers: Urza's armor absorbed it as it lay in her hand.

Another burst of popping hearts interrupted Xantcha's reverie. A hundred, perhaps several hundred, Phyrexians had died since she entered the vault, and the chamber was as bright as it had been when she entered. Xantcha tried to calculate how many glowing hearts lay on the surface, how many more might lay beneath. She gave up after a few attempts, but not before she'd decided that unless she told

Urza about the heart vault, it would be a very long battle before he achieved vengeance.

Her heart was too big to swallow, too risky to carry in her hand. Xantcha tucked it carefully inside her boot before she headed off.

Finding her way out of the Fane was harder than finding Urza. Flames, smoke and sorcery ratcheted through one- quarter of what passed for the Fourth Sphere sky. While she'd been looking for her heart, the demons had mounted a counterattack.

Urza's hulking dragon was surrounded by Phyrexia's smaller defenders: dragons, wyverns and whatever else had been summoned from the First Sphere through the very hole Urza had burnt for himself. As she'd warned him, individually Phyrexia had nothing that could equal his devastating tool, but in Phyrexia, individuals weren't important. For every compleated priest, even for every scrap-made digger or bearer, there were twenty warriors: fleshless, obedient, and relentless. The demons aimed the warriors at Urza's dragon where they died by the score and occasionally did damage.

The dragon's wings were shredded and useless. Two of its legs had been disabled; a third burst into melting flames while Xantcha looked for a path through the Phyrexian lines. Urza could still defend himself in all quarters but if-when-he lost a fourth leg, there'd be gaps, and it wouldn't take imagination to exploit them.