by Lynn Abbey
year." Free to tell Urza's secrets to the Red-Stripes? Never. But that was a worry for the future. For the present, "Give me your word."
"The word of a slave," Rat interrupted. "Remember that." He put his foot on the pedestal. "And be careful."
Xantcha brought the stone down with a crash that was louder than she'd expected, less effective, too. Perhaps it would be better to wait. Unfettering a youth who looked like Mishra might be all that Urza needed to free himself from the past.
And maybe they'd have to run from the Red-Stripes.
Xantcha understood how Urza must have felt when they traveled, worried about a companion who couldn't take care of herself; angry and bitter, too. She smashed the granite against the chain. Sparks flew, but the links didn't. Gritting her teeth, Xantcha pounded rapidly but to no greater success. When she paused for breath, Rat seized her wrists.
"Don't act the fool."
She could have dropped the stone on his foot and used both hands to throttle his insolence, and Xantcha might have, if she hadn't been so astonished to feel his warm, living flesh against hers. She and Urza touched each other, casually, but infrequently, and never with particular passion. Rat's hands shook as he held her, probably because slavery had weakened him, but there was something more, something elusive and unnerving. Xantcha was relieved that he released her the instant their eyes met.
"I'm trying to help you," she said acidly.
"You're not helping, you're just making noise. Noise is bad, if you're trying to hide. For that matter, why are we hiding? It's not as if Tucktah's going to tell the Red- Stripes I'm not your ransomed cousin."
"Just trying to keep you out of trouble."
Rat laughed. "You're too late for that, Xantcha. Now, why don't we stop playing child's games and go to your father's house? If Tabarna's laws still mean anything in this forsaken town, it's illegal for one Efuand to own another. You're the one who's in trouble for wasting your father's gold. You paid way too much to ransom me. Is your father a tyrant or can he be reasoned with?"
Given her disguise, Rat's presumptions weren't unreasonable. "I don't have a father. I don't live in this town. I live with Urza and we've got a long-" she considered telling him about the sphere and decided not to, "journey and since I have your word ..." She brought the stone down on the metal.
"You'll be at that all afternoon and halfway through the night."
Xantcha shrugged. They couldn't leave before then, not if she were going to use the sphere to get them over the walls. She smashed the stone again. A flake of granite drew blood from Rat's shin; the link was unharmed.
Rat rubbed the wound and lowered his leg. "All right. I don't believe you, but if you're determined to play your game to its end, there's an easier way to get out of this town. Do you have any money left?" Xantcha didn't answer, but Rat had seen her purse and presumably knew it wasn't empty. "Look, go back to the plaza and pay some farmer to load me in his wagon ... or, better, find a smith with a
decent hammer and chisel. Get these damn things off the same way they got put on."
With sleepers in the town, Xantcha didn't want to go looking for strangers, but there was one farmer in the plaza market who wasn't a stranger.
"I gave my horse to a fanner with a wagon-"
"You had a horse!?"
"I had no further need of it, so I gave it to a man who did and promised to care for it."
"Avohir's mercy, you had no need of a horse, so you gave it away. You didn't even bargain with Tucktah." He swore again. "I've been sold by a beast to a madman! No, a mad child. Doesn't you father usually keep you locked up?"
"I could sell you back," Xantcha said coldly. "I imagine you had a long and pleasant life ahead of you."
She started to retrace their route. Rat followed as quietly as he could with the chain dragging on the ground. Once they were back in the plaza, Xantcha told him to wait in the shadows while she negotiated with the farmer. He agreed, but measured every wall with his eyes and twisted each battered link, in the obvious hope that she'd weakened it, as soon as he thought she couldn't see him.
Well, he'd warned her what his word was worth.
When Xantcha pointed him out to the farmer, he wanted no part of her plan.
"I'll give you your horse back."
"A horse is no use to a slave with a chain between his ankles."
"Imagine if you set the slave free, he'd be willing to travel with you," the farmer countered, still skeptical.
"I forgot to buy the key to his chains."
The farmer hesitated. The slaver and her coffle had moved on, but the farmer had glanced toward the tavern when Xantcha had mentioned slaves. Likely he'd watched the whole scene with her, the slaver, Garve, and Rat.
"Have him come over, and I'll speak to him myself. Alone."
Moments later, Xantcha told Rat, "It's your choice. He wants to know if you're worth the risk."
Rat gave Xantcha a look that said liar, and got to his feet. Xantcha blocked his path.
"Look, I didn't tell him the truth about Una or Mishra or anything like that, just that we were cousins. And before, when I gave him the horse, I told him that I was alone because I'd been traveling with my uncle. We'd been ambushed by Shratta and everybody but me had been killed. It was good enough at the time, before I'd spotted you, but it's going to make things more difficult now."
Rat frowned and shook his head. "If I was as dumb as you, I'd've died before I learned to walk. What names did you give him?"
"None," Xantcha replied. "He didn't ask."
"You need a keeper, Xantcha," Rat muttered as he walked away from her. "You haven't got the sense Avohir gives to ants and worms."
Rat could have run, or tried to, but chose to get out of the town instead. The farmer waved for Xantcha to join them.
"Not saying I believe you, either of you," he said, offering Xantcha his plain woven cloak to wear instead of
her fancier one. "Climb in quickly now. These are strange times ... bad times. A man doesn't put his trust in words; I put mine in Avohir. I'll get you out of Medran, and Avohir be my judge if I'm wrong."
Xantcha considered stowing her sword in the wagon bed where Rat rode, with straw and empty baskets piled all around him to hide the chain. But her slave had a flair for storytelling. His imagination made her nervous.
"You're not wrong, good man," Rat said cheerfully as he rearranged the baskets. "Not about my cousin and me, not about the times, either. Two months ago, I had everything. Then one night I went carousing with friends who weren't friends and lost it all. Woke up in chains. I told them who I was: Ratepe, eldest son of Mideah from Pincar City, and said my father would ransom me; got a swift kick and a broken rib. I'd given up hope months ago, but I hadn't reckoned on my cousin, Arnuwan."
Xantcha jumped when Rat slapped her between the shoulders. Arnuwan was probably a less conspicuously foreign name than Xantcha, and the moment Rat introduced it, the farmer relaxed and offered his.
"Assor," he said and embraced Rat, not her.
Xantcha was used to following someone else. She'd followed Urza for over three thousand years, but Rat was different. Rat smiled and told Assor easy tales of pranks he and Arnuwan had pulled on their elders. He was very persuasive. She would have believed him herself, if she hadn't known that she was supposed to be Arnuwan. Of course, maybe there was an Arnuwan, and maybe Rat's only lie was that he didn't look at her while he was spinning out his tales. Maybe he was harmless, but Xantcha, who was nowhere near as harmless as she pretended to be, hadn't survived Phyrexia, Urza, and countless other perils, by assuming that anything was harmless.
She kept her sword close and palmed a few black-metal coins that hadn't come from any king or prince's mint. Then, as Assor called home to his harnessed horse, she settled in for the ride.
Silence hung thick among them. Ordinary folk going about their late-afternoon affairs looked up as they passed. Xantcha could think of nothing to say except that she longed to be in the air, head
ed back to the cottage, neither of which were safe subjects for conversation.
Then Rat asked the farmer, "Do you keep sheep in your fallows, or do you grow peas?" He followed that question with another and another until he'd lured the fanner into an animated discussion about the proper way to plow a field. The farmer favored straight furrows. Rat said a sunwise spiral toward the center was better. They were in mid-argument when the Red-Stripes waved the wagon through the gate.
As they cleared the first rise beyond the town walls, even Assor realized what Rat had done and while Xantcha willed away her armor he asked:
"Where are you from, lad? The truth ... no more of your lies. You're no one's cousin, and I'll wager you're no farmer either, despite your talk. You're too clever by half to be village-bred."
Rat grinned and told a different story. "I read, once, how Hatu-san the Blind, had escaped from a besieged city by
talking about the weather. It seemed worth trying."
"Read about it, eh?" Assor asked before Xantcha could say that she'd never heard of Hatusan the Blind. "Then, for certain, you're no farmer. I've never seen a book but Avohir's holy book and I listen 'stead of read. Is your name truly Ratepe, eldest son of Mideah?"
Xantcha was watching Rat closely from the corner of her eye. She caught him flinching as Assor sounded out his name. His rogue's grin vanished, replaced by an empty stare that looked at nothing and gave nothing away.
"It is," he answered with a voice that was both deeper and younger than she'd heard from him before. "And Mideah, my father, was a farmer when he died-a good farmer who plowed his fields sunwise every spring and fall. But he was a lector of philosophy at Tabarna's school in Pincar City before the Shratta burnt it down... ."
If Rat's second recounting of his life was more accurate than his first, he'd had a comfortable childhood and loving parents. But his cozy world had been overturned ten years ago when the Shratta swarmed the royal city, preaching that any knowledge that couldn't be read in Avohir's book wasn't knowledge at all. They had no use for libraries or schools, so they set them ablaze. Rat's father had been one of many who'd appealed to Tabarna for protection against the Shratta mobs, and to Tabarna's son, Catal, who funded the Red-Stripes to protect them. Then Catal died, poisoned by the Shratta, or so said the Red- Stripes, who'd avenged his death. The city dissolved into carnage and riot.
"We tried. Father grew a beard, Mother made jellies and sold them in the market. I stayed out of trouble-tried to stay out of trouble. But it wasn't any use. The Shratta knew our names. They caught my uncle-I called him my uncle, but he was only a friend, my father's closest friend. They drew his guts out through a hole in his belly, then they set fire to his house-after they'd locked his family inside. Our neighbors came to set our house ablaze, too. Father said that they were afraid of everything, ready to believe anything. He said it wasn't their fault, but that didn't stop the flames. We got away through a hole in the garden wall."
Xantcha wanted to believe her slave. She'd been to Pincar City where simple houses, each with a tidy garden, packed the narrow streets. She could almost see a frightened family running through moonlight, though Rat hadn't said whether they'd left by day or night. That seemed to be Rat's charm, Rat's near-magic. When he took a deep breath and started talking, everything he said rang true.
Mishra never stooped to flattery, Kayla Bin-Kroog had written nearly thirty-four hundred years earlier. He didn't have to. He had the gift of sincerity, and he was the most dangerous man I ever met.
"We fled to Avular, where my mother had kin. From Avular, we went to Gam."
Assor grunted; he'd heard of the place. "Good land for flocks and herding, not so good for grain-growing."
"Not so good for city-bred boys, either," Rat added. "But the Shratta didn't bother us. At least they didn't bother us any more than they bothered everyone else. We
paid their tithes and lived by the book and thought we were lucky."
Xantcha clenched her teeth. In all the multiverse, there was no curse to compare with feeling lucky.
"I'd taken two sheep to the next village, to a man who didn't need sheep, but he had a daughter... ." Rat almost smiled before his face hardened. "I missed the Shratta as I left, and it was over when I returned. All Gam was dead: butchered, the men with their throats slit, the women strangled with their skirts, the children with their skulls smashed against the walls... ." Rat's voice had flattened, as if he were reciting from a dull text, yet that lack of expression served to make his words all the more believable. "I found my father, my mother, my brother and sister. I shouldn't have looked. It would have been better not to know. Then I ran to the next village, but I was too late there as well. Everybody I knew was dead. I wanted to join them. I wanted to die, or join the Red- Stripes, if I could get to Avular. I knew the way, but the slavers found me the second night."
Either Rat told the painful truth or he was a stone- cold liar. The farmer had no doubts. He cursed the Shratta, then the Red-Stripes, and having already heard Xantcha's false tale earlier in the day, invited them both into his family.
Xantcha declined. "We have family awaiting us in the south." The wagon was rolling west. "It's time for us to take our leave. Past time ... we should have taken the last crossroads."
Both Xantcha and the farmer looked to Rat, who hesitated before shucking off the straw and baskets that had concealed his fetters.
"Good work," Xantcha whispered while the farmer scuttled about, filling one of the baskets with food.
"He's a good man," said Rat.
The farmer presented them with the basket before Xantcha could challenge her companion's resolve. Xantcha returned the homespun cloak.
"Walk fast," he said, then remembered Rat's fetters. "Try. There's been no trouble this close to Medran, but we all lay close after sundown. The moon's waxed; there'll be light on the road.
When you get south to Stezine, ask for Korde. He's the smith there. Tell him you rode with me, with Assor, his wife's brother-by-marriage. He'll break that chain on his anvil. Luck to you."
Xantcha hoisted the basket and started walking, glancing back over her shoulder after every few steps.
"He didn't believe you," Rat chided.
"He didn't believe either of us."
"He believed me because I told the truth."
"So did I," Xantcha countered.
Rat shook his head. "Not to me, you haven't. Urza, Mishra, dead uncles, and ransomed cousins. You're a lousy liar, Xantcha."
She let the provocations pass. They walked until the wagon had rolled from sight, and then Xantcha stopped. She set down the basket and faced Rat with her fists on her hips.
"I saved your life, Ratepe, that's no lie. All I've
asked in return is that you help me with Urza. It doesn't matter if you believe me, so long as I can trust you."
"You bought me. You can make me do what you ask, but I'll fight you, I swear it, every step of the way. That's what you can trust."
"I ransomed you."
"Ransom? Avohir's mercy, you said I was your cousin-do you think Tucktah believed that? You're a bold liar, Xantcha. That's not the same as a good one. Tucktah sold me, you bought me. I'm still a slave. Don't bother being kind. I won't love you, and I will escape."
Xantcha sighed and rolled her eyes dramatically. Rat accepted the invitation by lunging for her throat. If it had been a fair fight, Xantcha would have gone down and stayed down. Rat's reach was half an arm longer than hers, and he weighed nearly twice as much. But Rat hadn't been fed enough to maintain the muscles on his long bones, and Xantcha was a Phyrexian newt. Urza said she was built like a cat or a serpent, slippery and supple, impossible to pin down or keep unbalanced.
Rat had her on her back for a heartbeat before she threw him aside. While he rose slowly to his knees, Xantcha sprang to her feet. She snapped her fingers.
"There ... you're free. As simple as that. You're no longer a slave. I ask you to honor what I have given you, and help me with Urza. When
you've done that, in a year, I'll return you to this place. I give you my word."
"You're a moon cow, Xantcha. Your parts don't fit together: fine clothes, a sword, gold nari from Morvern, and this Urza of yours. Avohir's mercy-what do you take me for?"
Rat tried to side step around her, but his fetters insured that his strides were shorter than hers. After a few more failed evasions, Xantcha seized his wrists.
"You were going to die, Ratepe."
"Maybe, maybe not-" Rat had the reach, the leverage to free himself, and as soon as he had an opportunity, he grabbed for the slave goad tucked in Xantcha's belt.
"Throw it down," Xantcha warned. "I don't want to hurt you."
Rat laughed and played his fingers over the rod's smooth black surface. A shimmering, yellow web sprang from its tip. "You can't hurt me. You can save yourself from getting hurt by dropping your purse and your sword on the ground, turning around, and following that wagon."
Xantcha eyed the web. She could feel its power where she stood, but it had belonged to Garve. Tucktah wouldn't have given her dim assistant a goad that could seriously damage the merchandise. With a frustrated sigh, she gave Rat one last chance. "You owe me your life. Make peace with me and be done with it."
Rat rushed her, raising his arm for a mighty blow that Xantcha easily eluded. She stomped one foot on his chain, then put her fist in his gut. He tried to move with the punch but lost his balance when the chain tightened. He fell hard, leading with his forehead and losing his grip on the slave goad. Xantcha grabbed the goad and broke it. Despite the numbing, yellow light that oozed over her arms, she hurled both pieces far into the brush beyond the road. She retrieved the farmer's basket.
Rat had levered himself onto one elbow and was trying to rise further, when she shoved him onto his back again. She put the food basket on his stomach then knelt on his breastbone.
"All right, you win. You're a slave, and you'll do what I tell you to do because I can make you."
Xantcha inhaled deeply. She ran through her mnemonic rhyme, then she yawned. The sphere was invisible but not imperceptible. Rat screamed as it flowed around him.
