Planeswalker by Lynn Abbey Read Free Book Online Page A

responsibilities. They obeyed their orders without
enthusiasm, until one of the newts made a mistake.
    Newts you are, and newts you shall remain forever,
they'd recite as they dealt out punishment with one hand
after the other. You are destined to sleep on another
world. Now learn the ways of another world. Listen and
obey.
    Xantcha wondered what would have happened if she'd
    failed to listen or obey. At the time, the notion simply
didn't occur to her. Life on the First Sphere was hard
enough without disobedience. The newts were taught farming,
in preparation for the day when their destiny would be
fulfilled, but the slippery dirt of the First Sphere
resisted their every effort. The plows, sickles, hoes, and
pitchforks that they were commanded to use left their
muscles aching. The whiplike, razor-grass-the only plant
they could grow-slashed them bloody, and the harsh light
blistered their skin mercilessly.
    Xantcha remembered another newt, Gi'anzha; whose place
was near hers in the cadre. Gi'anzha had used a grass sheaf
to hack off its arm, then shoved a pitchfork shaft into the
bloody socket. Gi'anzha was meat by the time they found it,
but Xantcha and the other newts understood why it had done
what it had.
    Newts were small and fragile compared to everything
else that dwelt on the First Sphere. Their uncompleated
bodies suffered injuries rather than malfunctions. They
could not be repaired but were left to heal as best they
could, which sometimes wasn't good enough. Failed newts-
meat newts-were whisked back to the Fourth Sphere for
rendering. Waste not, want not, nothing in Phyrexia was
completely without use, though meat was reviled by the
compleat, who'd transcended their flesh and were sustained
by glistening oil.
    As her cadre was reduced to meat, Xantcha's place
within it changed. Another newt should have been Xantcha,
she should have become G'xi'kzi or Kra'tzin, but too much
time had passed since the vat-priests had organized the
cadre. The patterns of their minds were as fixed as those
of their soft, battered bodies. Xantcha she was, and
Xantcha she remained, even when the cadre had shrunk so
much that the priests alloyed it with another, similarly
depleted group.
    Xantcha found herself face-to-face with another
Xantcha. For both of them, it was... confusion. The word
scarcely existed in Phyrexia, except to describe the clots
of slag and ash that accumulated beneath the great
furnaces. Together they consulted the priests, as newts
were trained to do. The priests judged that as a result of
the recombination, neither of them truly stood in the spot
of Xantcha. The alloyed cadre's Xantcha was a third newt,
who thought of itself as Hoz'krin and wanted no part of
this Xantcha confusion. Xantcha and Xantcha were each told
to recognize new places within the alloyed cadre or face
the lash.
    Lash or no, the priests' judgment was not acceptable.
Places had become names that could not be surrendered, even
under the threat of punishment. The Xantchas stayed awake
when they should have slept in their boxes. They slipped
away from the priests and spoke to each other privately.
Meeting in private with another newt was something neither
had done before. They negotiated and they compromised,
though there were no Phyrexian words for either process.
They agreed to make themselves unique. Xantcha broke off a
blade of the razor-sharp grass and hacked off the hair
growing on the left side of her skull. The other Xantcha
soaked its hair in an acid stream until it turned orange.
    They had rebelled-a word as forbidden as the
    Ineffable's true name and almost as feared. Only the
tender-priests could change a newt's shape and only
according to the Ineffable's plan. When the Xantchas
returned to the place where their cadre gathered for food
and sleep, the other newts gaped and turned away, as the
teacher-priests came rumbling and clanking from the
perimeter.
    Xantcha had taken the