Planeswalker by Lynn Abbey Page B

the arena, where Phyrexian warriors
honed their skills against engines and artifacts made in
Phyrexia or creatures imported from other worlds. She was
assigned tasks no warrior would have dared: feeding the
creatures, repairing damaged engines, and destroying those
artifacts the warriors had merely damaged. Her death had
been expected, even anticipated, but when the fearsome
wyverns with their fiery eyes and razor claws went on a
rampage that reduced a hundred priests and warriors to oil-
caked rubble, Xantcha the newt had survived without a
scratch.
    Since she wouldn't die and they'd failed to kill her,
the planner-priests decided that Xantcha had the makings of
a dodger.
    Before he'd closed his eyes in sleep, the Ineffable had
decreed that Phyrexia must be relentless in its exploration
of other worlds and in the exploitation of whatever useful
materials, methods and artifacts that exploration
uncovered. Exploration was the easy part. A compleat
Phyrexian, sheathed in metal and bathed in glistening oil,
was thorough and precise. It was incapable of boredom and,
when ordered to examine everything, it did exactly that, as
accurate at the end as it had been in the beginning.
    But confronted with something they'd never seen before,
lesser Phyrexians often became confused, and through their
rough bumbling they frequently destroyed not only
themselves but whatever they'd been examining as well. It
was an intolerable situation and necessitated an unpleasant
    solution. Whole colonies of gremlins were endured, even
nurtured, for their canniness and spontaneity, but no
gremlin was cannier than the remnants of Gix's newts; the
ones that refused to die.
    There were twenty of them summoned to the fountain, as
identical as ever. They couldn't drink the glistening oil,
so they were bathed in it while rows and ranks of compleat
Phyrexians watched in silence. A mobile planner-priest
described their new destiny:
    Go forth with the diggers and the bearers. Gaze upon
the creations of born minds. Decipher their secrets so that
they may be exploited safely for the glory and dominion of
Phyrexia.
    There'd been more. Compleat Phyrexians never suffered
from fatigue during an endless oration. They had no tongues
to turn thick or pasty from overuse. And, of course, they
lacked imagination. Never mind that Urza ridiculed
Xantcha's imagination; she had more than the rest of
Phyrexia rolled together. Standing beside the fountain,
slick with glistening oil, Xantcha had imagined a wondrous
future.
    Her future began on a world whose name she had never
known. Perhaps the searcher-priests had known its name when
they came to investigate it, but once they discovered
something useful to Phyrexia, the name of the place where
they'd found it was of little importance to the team of
diggers, bearers, and dodgers sent to exploit the
discovery.
    Once the ambulator portals were configured, it didn't
matter where a world truly lay. Just one step forward into
the glassy black disk the searcher-priests unrolled across
the ground and whoosh, the team was where it needed to be.
When the team finished its work-usually an excavation and
extraction-they'd pack everything up, stride into the
ambulator's nether end (identical to the prime end, except
that it lacked the small configuration panel) and whoosh,
they were back where they started, waiting for the next
assignment.
    The ambulators were horrible artifacts: suffocating,
freezing, and endless, and a dodger's work was worse than
cleaning up after the warriors. The chief digger would lead
a newt, and a gremlin or two to whatever artifact had
roused the searcher-priests' attention, then sit back at a
safe distance while dodgers did the dangerous work. Much of
what the teams excavated was abandoned weapons, frequently
still primed and hair-triggered; the rest, while not
intended as weapons, still had a tendency to explode.
    Xantcha quickly realized that gremlins