by Lynn Abbey
The one-room dwelling was filled with smoke. Xantcha called Rat's name and got no answer. Back on the village's single street, she headed for the largest building she could see and had taken about ten strides when an arrow struck her shoulder. Urza's armor was as good as granite when it came to arrows. The shaft splintered, and the arrowhead slid harmlessly down her back.
In one smooth movement, Xantcha spun around and hurled a small, black coin at a fleeing archer. The coin began to glow as soon as it left her hand. It was white-hot by the time it struck the archer's neck. He was dead before he hit the ground, with thick, greenish-black fumes rising from the fatal wound.
A swordsman attacked Xantcha next. He knocked her down with his first attack but was unnerved when she sprang up, unbloodied. Xantcha parried his next strike with her forearm as she closed in to kick him once in the stomach and a second time, as he crumbled, to the jaw. She paused to pick up the sword, then continued down the street shouting Rat's name, attracting attention.
Two more men appeared in front of her. They knew each
other and the warrior's trade, giving each other room, exchanging gestures and cryptic commands as they approached. The strategy might have worked if Xantcha had been unarmored or if the sword had been her only weapon. Her aim with the coins wasn't as good with her off-weapon hand. Only one struck its target, but that was enough. The other two exploded when they hit the ground, leaving goat- sized craters in the packed dirt.
Her surviving enemy rushed forward, more intent on getting out of the village than fighting. Xantcha swung, but he parried well and had momentum on his side. Xantcha slammed backward into the nearest wall when he shoved her aside. Elsewhere in the village, someone blew three rapid notes on a horn, and a weaponed quartet at the other end of the village street dashed for the gate. For religious fanatics, the Shratta were better disciplined than most armies. Dark suspicion led Xantcha to inhale deeply, but beyond the smoke and the blood, there was nothing Phyrexian in the air.
A straggler ran past. Xantcha let him go. This was Rat's fight, not hers, and she didn't yet know if he'd survived.
"Ra-te-pe!" She used all three syllables of his name. "Ra-te-pe, son of Mideah, get yourself out here!"
A face appeared in the darkened doorway of the barn that had been her destination. It belonged to an older man, armed with a pitchfork. He stepped unsteadily over the doorsill.
"No one here owns that name."
"There'd better be. He's meat if he ran."
Two more villagers emerged from the barn: a woman clutching her bloody arm against her side and a stone-faced toddler who clung to her skirt.
"Who are you?" the elder asked, giving the pitchfork a shake, reminding Xantcha that she held a bare and bloody sword.
"Xantcha. Rat and I were ... nearby." She threw the sword into the dirt beside the last man she'd killed. "He saw the roofs burning."
They still were. The survivors made no effort to extinguish the blazes. A village like this probably had one well and only a handful of buckets. The cottages were partly stone; they could be rebuilt after the fires burnt out.
The elder shook his head. Plainly he didn't believe that anyone had simply been nearby. But Xantcha had laid down her weapon. He shouted an all's well that lured a few more mute survivors from their hiding places.
Still no Rat.
Xantcha turned, intending to investigate the other end of the village. The woman who'd fled-the one who'd seen them descend in the sphere-was on the street behind her. Her reappearance, alive and unharmed, broke the villagers' shock. Another woman let out a cry that could have been either joy or grief.
The returning woman replied, "Mother," but her eyes were locked on Xantcha and her hands were knotted in ward- signs against evil.
Time to find Rat and get moving. Xantcha walked quickly to the other end of the village where a whitewashed temple
held the place of honor. The door was held open by a corpse.
Given who was fighting in Efuan Pincar, Xantcha supposed she shouldn't have been surprised that the temple had become a char-nel house. She counted ten men, each with his hands bound and his throat slit, lying in a common, bloody pool. There were more corpses, similarly bound, sprawled closer to the altar, but she'd spotted Rat staring at a wall before she'd counted them. "We've got to leave."
He didn't twitch. The scabbard was gone; the sword blade was dark and glistening in the temple's gloomy light. Rat had probably never held a sword before Xantcha made him more afraid of her than death. Odds were he'd become a killer, if not a fighter, in the past hour. A man could crack under that kind of strain. Xantcha approached him cautiously. "Rat? Ratepe?"
The wall was covered with bloody words. Xantcha could read a score of Dominarian languages, most of them long- extinct, none of them Efuand. "What does it say?"
"Those who defile the Shratta will be cleansed in their own blood. Blessed be Avohir, in whose name this has been done."'
Xantcha placed her hand over his sword-gripping hand. Without a word, Rat released the hilt.
"If there are gods," she said softly, "then thugs like the Shratta don't speak for them."
She tried to guide Rat toward the door; he resisted, quietly but completely. Mortals, men who were born and who grew old, saw death in ways no Phyrexian newt could imagine, in ways Urza had forgotten. Xantcha had exhausted her meager store of platitudes.
"You knew the Shratta were here, Rat. You must have known what you'd find."
"No."
"I stopped at other villages before I got to Medran. You weren't the first to tell me about the Shratta. This is their handiwork."
"It's not!" Rat shrugged free.
"It's time to leave." Xantcha grasped his arm again.
Rat struck like a serpent but did no harm only because Xantcha was a hair's breath faster in jumping away. She recognized madness on his tear-streaked face.
"All right. Tell me. Talk to me. Why isn't this Shratta handiwork?"
"Him."
Rat pointed at an isolated corpse slumped in the corner between the written-on wall and the wall behind the altar. The man had died because his gut had been slashed open, but he had other wounds, many other wounds, none of which had bled appreciably. Xantcha, who'd fought and sometimes succumbed to her own blind rages, knew at once that this was the man-probably the only man-that Rat had killed.
"All right, what about him?"
"Look at him! He's not Shratta!"
"How do you know?" Xantcha asked, willing to believe him, if he had a good answer.
"Look at his hands!"
She nudged them with her foot. The light was bad, but they seemed ordinary enough to her. "What? I see nothing unordinary."
"The Hands of God. The Shratta are Avohir's Avengers. They tattoo their hands with Shratta-verses from Avohir's holy book."
"Maybe he was a new recruit?"
Rat shook his head vigorously. "It's more than his hands. He's clean-shaven. The Shratta never cut their beards."
Xantcha ran through her memory. Since she'd arrived in Efuan Pincar the only clean-shaven men she'd seen had been in Medran, wearing Red-Stripe tunics, and here where the men she'd fought and the man Rat had killed were beardless.
"So, it's not the Shratta after all? It's Red-Stripes pretending to be Shratta?" she asked.
And knowing that the Phyrexians had invaded the Red- Stripe cadres, Xantcha asked another, silent, question: Had the Phyrexians created their own enemy to bring war and suffering to an obscure corner of Dominaria? If so, they'd learned considerable subtlety since Oix destined her to sleep on another world.
Rat's head continued to shake. "I've seen the Shratta cut through a family like ripe cheese. I saw them draw my uncle's guts out through a hole in his gut: they'd said he'd spilled dog's blood on the book. I know the Shratta, Xantcha, and this is what they'd do, except, this man isn't-and can't be-Shratta."
Keeping her voice calm, Xantcha said, "You said you were gone when the Shratta came thro
ugh your village. You didn't see anything. It could have been the Red-Stripes."
"Could've," Rat agreed easily. "But I saw my uncle get killed, and I saw it before we left Pincar City, and it was the Shratta. By the book, by the true book, Xantcha. Why would Red-Stripes do this? No one but the Shratta support the Shratta. The people here ... at home, what was home . . . the Shratta would come, real Shratta, and they'd tell us what to do, which was mostly give them everything we had and then some; and they would kill if they didn't get what they wanted." Rat shuddered. "My family were strangers, driven out of Pincar City, but everyone hated the Shratta as much as we did. We'd pray ... we'd all pray, Xantcha, to Avohir to send us red-striped warriors from the cities. The Red-Stripes were our protectors."
"Be careful what you pray for, I guess. It sounds like the Red-Stripes may have been doing the Shratta's dirty work, and leaving behind no witnesses to reveal the truth."
Rat had reached a similar conclusion. "And if that's true, they're not finished with this place. They're waiting outside. They won't have gone away. Everyone here is dead, you and me, too, unless we can kill them all."
"It's worse than that, Rat. Somebody's gone. Somebody's running a report back somewhere." To a Phyrexian sleeper, saying he'd seen a dark-haired youth hovering in a sphere? No, she'd killed the thug who'd seen them in the sphere. But she'd shaken off an arrow. Phyrexians might lack imagination, but they had excellent memories. Somebody might remember Gix's identical newts, especially since Dominaria was the world Phyrexia coveted above all others, the world of her earliest dreams. Urza was right, as usual. She'd lost her temper, and the price could be very high. "We've got to leave."
"Everyone will die!"
"No deader than they'd be if we'd never set foot here."
"But their blood will be on our hands-on my hands, since you don't seem to have a conscience. I'm not leaving."
"There's no point in staying."
"The Red-Stripes will come back. We'll kill them, then we can leave."
"I told you, there's no point. They'll have sent a runner. This village is doomed."
Rat paced noisily. "All right, it's doomed. So after we kill the Red-Stripes that are still outside the village, you take these people, one by one, to other villages, where they can spread the truth and disappear. By the time the runner leads more Red-Stripes here, this place will be empty. It can be done."
"You can't be serious."
But Rat was, and Xantcha had a conscience. It could be done. First came a long, violent night roaming the fields outside the village with her armor and a sharp knife, followed by three days of burying the dead and another five of ferrying frightened survivors to places where they could "spread the truth about the Shratta and the Red-Stripes then disappear." But it was done, and on the morning of the tenth day, after leaving Rat's fetters draped across the defiled altar, they resumed their journey out of Efuan Pincar.
CHAPTER 8
Xantcha guided the sphere with a rigid hand. The Glimmer Moon hung low in the night sky, painfully bright yet providing little illumination for the land below. A dark ridge loomed to the south. On the other side of that ridge there was a familiar cottage with two front doors and the bed in which she expected to be sleeping before midnight.
It was a clear night reminiscent of winter. The air was dead-calm and freezing within the sphere. Her feet had been quietly numb since sundown. Beside her, Rat hadn't said a word since the first stars appeared. She hoped he was asleep.
And perhaps he was, but he awoke when the sphere pitched forward and plummeted toward a black-mirror lake Xantcha hadn't noticed. He'd had nearly two weeks to learn when to tuck his head and keep his terror to himself, but in the dark, with food and whatnot tumbling around them, Xantcha didn't begrudge Rat a moment of panic. In truth, she scarcely noticed his shouts; the plunge caught her unprepared. It was several moments before she heard anything other than her own heart's pounding.
By then Rat had reclaimed his perch atop the sacks. "You could set us down for the night," he suggested.
"We're almost there."
"You said that at noon."
"It was true then, and it's truer now. We're almost to the cottage."
Rat made an unhappy noise in the back of his throat. Xantcha gave him a sidelong glance. Through the dim light she could see that he'd hunched down in his cloak and pulled the cowl up so it formed a funnel around his face.
She'd collected Rat's new clothes as she'd ferried Red- Stripe survivors to other Efuand villages. They were nothing like the clothes Mishra would have worn- nothing like the travel-worn silks and suedes Xantcha herself wore- but they were the best she'd been able to find, and Rat had seemed genuinely grateful for them.
He'd cleaned up better than Xantcha had dared hope. Their first full day in the ruined village, while she'd been talking relocation with the elders, Rat had persuaded one of the women to trim his hair. He'd procured a handful of pumice the same way and spent that afternoon scrubbing himself-and being scrubbed-in the stream-fed pool where the women did laundry.
"You didn't have to bother the villagers." Xantcha had told him when she'd seen him next, all pink and raw, especially on the chin. "I could have loaned you my knife."
He'd looked down at her, shaking his head and half- smiling. "When you're old enough to grow whiskers, Xantcha, you'll realize a man doesn't have to cut his own hair."
Xantcha had started to say that with or without whiskers Rat would never be as old as she was, but that half-smile had confused her. Even now, when she couldn't see through the dark or the cowl, she suspected he was half-smiling again, and she didn't know what to say. Once washed and dressed in clothes that didn't reek, he'd proved attractive, at least to the extent that Xantcha understood mortal handsomeness. Rat didn't resemble any of Xantcha's Antiquity Wars portraits, and there was a generosity to him that softened the otherwise hard lines of his face.
Rat had healed almost as fast as a newt. His bruises were shadows now, and the sores around his neck, wrists, and ankles shrank daily. Every morning had seen a bit more flesh on his bones, a bit more swagger in his stride. He'd become Mishra: charming, passionate, unpredictable, and vaguely dangerous. Kayla Bin-Kroog would have known what to say-Kayla had known what to say to Urza's brother-but Xantcha wasn't Urza's wife, and, anyway, Rat thought of her as a boy, a deception that, all other things considered, Xantcha thought she might continue after they returned to the cottage ... if Urza cooperated.
She touched his shoulder gingerly. "Don't worry, we'll be there tonight."
Rat shrugged her hand away. The cowl fell, and she could see his face faintly in the moonlight. He wasn't smiling. "Tonight or tomorrow morning, what difference can it make?"
"Urza's waiting. It's been more a month since I left. I've never been gone this long."
"You'll be gone forever if you don't stop pushing yourself. Even if he were the real Urza, he'd tell you to rest before you hurt yourself."
Rat didn't know Urza. Urza was inexhaustible, indestructible; he assumed Xantcha was too, and so, usually, did she.
"We're almost there. I'm not tired, and I don't need to rest." The words were no sooner said than the sphere caught another downdraft, not as precipitous as the first one, but enough to fling them against each other. "You're making mistakes."
"You know nothing about this!" Xantcha shot back. She
tilted her hand too far, overcorrected, and wound up in Rat's lap.
He pushed her away. "What more do I need to know? Put it down."
"I didn't argue with you when you said those villagers needed to be rescued."
"I'm not arguing with you. I know you want me to meet Urza. You think there's not a moment to lose against the Phyrexians, but not like this, Xantcha. This is foolish, as foolish as buying me in the first place, only I can't help you keep this damn thing in the air."
"Right-you can't help, so be quiet."
And he was, as quiet as he'd been that first night out of Medran. Xantcha hadn'
t believed it was possible, but Rat's silence was worse than Urza's, because Rat wasn't ignoring her. He wasn't frightened, either; just sitting beside her, a cold, blank wall even when she pushed the sphere against the wind. There were moments when she could believe that Rat was Urza's real brother.
"You don't have to be Mishra, not yet."
Another of Rat's annoyed, annoying noises. "I'm not being Mishra. Mishra wouldn't care if you killed yourself getting him to Urza and, if you asked me, the real Urza wouldn't either. The real Urza didn't care about anything except what he wanted. The way you're acting, I'm starting to think you believe what you've been telling me. It's all over your face, Xantcha. You're the one who's worried because you're afraid. More afraid of the man you call Urza, I think, than of any Phyrexian."
It was Xantcha's turn to stare at the black ridge on the southern horizon and convince herself that Rat was wrong. The ridge was beneath them before she broke the silence.
"You don't believe anything I've told you."
"It's pretty far-fetched."
"But you've come all this way with me. There were so many times, when I was ferrying the villagers about, that you could have run away, but you didn't. I thought you'd decided I was telling you the truth. Why did you stop trying to run away, if you didn't believe anything I said?"
"Because six months ago I would've sworn on my life that I'd never leave Efuan Pincar, not with some half-wit boy whose got a thing in his belly. I'd've sworn a lot of things six months ago, and I'd've been wrong about all of them. I'm getting used to being wrong and I did give you my word, freely, when you agreed to get those villagers to safety, that I'd play your game. You weren't paying attention, but I was. You saved them because I asked you to, and that makes you my friend, at least for now."
"You've got to believe, Rat. If you don't believe, Urza won't, and I don't know what he'll do-to either of us-if he thinks I've tried to deceive him."
"I'll worry about Urza the Artificer," Rat said wearily.
He was patronizing her, despite everything she'd told him. All the lessons in language and history she'd given to him after dark in the village, Rat didn't believe.
