by Lynn Abbey
Gix had said the Thran were waiting. The demon could have rummaged the name out of her memories or out of Mishra
during the war. Almost certainly Gix wasn't telling the truth; at least not the important parts of it, but Urza needed to know what had happened in the catacomb beneath Avohir's temple in Pincar City.
"I met ... I found ..." She was still tongue-tied. Had the demon left something in her that left her able to think but not to speak? It wasn't impossible. Gix savored fear spiced with helplessness and frustration. She didn't know the measure of the red light's power, but she'd lost an entire afternoon in the catacomb, and when Ratepe burst out of memory to save her, she'd been doing the unthinkable: walking toward Phyrexia.
"Xantcha?" Urza stopped. He faced her and gave her his full attention.
"We have to go back to Pincar City."
"No, Efuan Pincar is out of the question. Anywhere we've found sleepers is out of the question. You and he have to go someplace, of course. I don't want anyone around while I'm working this time. I could wait. I should wait until after the Glimmer Moon rises. We can never know the future, Xantcha. I'm sure of that. Only the past is forever, and only now gives us choices. I choose to give the next nine days to you and him so you will always have them. Tell me where you want to be, and I'll 'walk you both there in the morning."
Nine days. Nine days in hiding while she sorted out her tangled thoughts? It was the coward's way, but Xantcha seized it. "I'll talk to him." A lie. Xantcha could feel that confessing to Ratepe would be no easier than confessing to Urza. "We'll decide where we want to go."
Ratepe welcomed them with the enthusiasm and relief of any talkative youth who'd kept company with himself for entirely too long. He cast several inquiring glances Xantcha's way. She pretended not to notice them while Urza announced his intention to reclaim his workroom for the next nine days.
"You told Urza," Ratepe snapped to Xantcha the moment they were alone together. "Now he's taking over everything! Just tell me, did you get my artifacts attached to Avohir's altar?"
"One," Xantcha answered truthfully. "There were sleepers in the temple, made up as Shratta. And Shratta dead in the catacombs. They were finished years ago, Ratepe. If there are Shratta left, they're like the Efuands in the Red-Stripes. They're in league, consciously or not, with Phyrexia." She thought of Gix; this wasn't the time to tell him, not when they were both angry. "I put your shatter-spiders, and screamers, too, in places where the glistening scent was strong. I didn't get to the barracks."
Ratepe threw his head back and swore at the ceiling. "What were you thinking! I don't want to bring Avohir's sanctuary down-not while the Red-Stripe barracks is still standing!" He shook his head and stood with his back to her. "When it wasn't what I expected, you should've waited. Sweet Avohir, what did you tell Urza?"
Xantcha's guilt and anxiety evaporated. "I didn't tell him anything!" she shouted.
"Then keep your voice down!"
"Stop telling me what to do!"
They were on opposite sides of the table, ready to
lunge at each other, and not with the passion that normally accompanied their reunions. Ratepe seemed to have outrun himself. Jaw clenched, eyes pleading, he looked across the table, but Xantcha was similarly paralyzed. It was her nature, created in Phyrexia and shaped over time in Urza's company, to back down or explode when cornered. This was a moment when she couldn't see a clear path in either direction.
The door was at her back. Xantcha ducked and ran out, leaving it open behind her, listening for the sounds that never came. She settled in the darkness, wrestling with her conscience, until the lamps in her shared room had flickered and died. Approaching the door through starlight, she saw a dark silhouette at the table, where Ratepe had fallen asleep with his head on his arms. She crept past him, as silently as she'd crept toward the Pincar catacomb. Her bed was strung with a creaking rope mattress. Xantcha quietly tucked herself in a corner by her treasure chest.
Ratepe was sprawled on the bed when she awoke. Urza was in the doorway, the golden light of dawn behind him.
"Are you ready to "walk?" he asked.
Urza never came into her side of the cottage. Perhaps he thought she'd been sleeping in the corner since Ratepe arrived. They weren't ready to 'walk anyway; Ratepe wasn't ready to wake up. He was cross-grained from the moment his eyes opened. Xantcha expected him to start something they'd all regret, but instead he just said, "You decide," as he slipped past Urza on his way to the well.
"We don't need you to 'walk us anywhere," Xantcha said to Urza as she stretched the kinks out of her legs. Her foot felt as if her boot was lined with hot, sharp needles.
"I don't want you near here while I work."
"We won't be."
"Don't dawdle, then. I want to get started!"
Ratepe stayed away while Xantcha rearranged her traveling gear. She packed a good deal of gold and silver, which could be traded wherever they went, but included copper, too, in case they got no farther than their closest neighbors along the frontier between the ridge and the coast. She threw in flour for journey bread, as well, and thought about the hunter's bow suspended from the rafters. Nine days could be an uncomfortably long time to live off journey bread, but a bow could be troublesome in a city. In the end Xantcha put a few more coins in her belt purse, left the bow on its hook, and met a sulking Ratepe beside the well.
Urza either didn't notice or didn't care that Xantcha and Ratepe were scarcely speaking to each other. He'd been away from his workroom for nearly a half-year and didn't wait to see the sphere rise before sealing himself in with his ideas.
The morning sun was framed with fair weather clouds against a rich blue sky. Prairie wildflowers blanketed the land above which the sphere soared. It was difficult, in the face of such natural beauty, to remain sullen and sour, but Xantcha and Ratepe both rose to the challenge. A northwest wind stream caught the sphere and carried it toward Kovria, southeast of the ridge. There was nothing in the Kovrian barrens to hold Xantcha's attention, no destinations worth mentioning, but changing their course
meant choosing their course, so they drifted into Kovria.
By mid-afternoon, the tall-grass prairies of the ridge had given way to badlands.
"Where are we going?" Ratepe asked, virtually the first full sentence he'd uttered since the sphere rose.
"Where does it look like we're going?"
"Nowhere."
"Then nowhere, it is. Nowhere's good enough for me."
"Put us down. You're crazed, Xantcha. Something happened in Efuan Pincar, and it's left you crazed. I don't want to be up here with you."
Xantcha brought them down on a plain of baked dirt and weedy scrub. They were both silent while the sphere collapsed and powdered.
"What went wrong?" Ratepe asked as he brushed the last of the white stuff from his face. "It's not just sleepers. Sleepers wouldn't frighten you, and you're afraid. I didn't think there was anything that could do that."
"Lots of things frighten me. Urza frightens me, sometimes. You frighten me. The between-worlds frightens me. Demons frighten me." Xantcha tore a handful of leaves off the nearest bush and began shredding them. Let Ratepe guess; let him choose, if he could.
"There was a demon in Avohir's temple? In the catacombs with the dead Shratta? A Phyrexian demon?"
Ratepe was uncommonly good at guessing and choosing. "I don't know any other kind."
"Avohir's mercy! You and Urza didn't find demons anywhere else, did you?" "I didn't."
"Why Efuan Pincar? If a Phyrexian demon was going to come to Dominaria, why come to Efuan Pincar. We keep to ourselves. When our ancestors left Argive, they never looked back. They settled on the north shore of Gulmany because it's so far away from everywhere else. We're not rich. We don't bother our neighbors, and they've never bothered us. We don't even have an army-which is probably why we had trouble with the Shratta and the Red-Stripes, but why would that interest Phyrexia? I don't understand. Do you?"
&nb
sp; "I told you, demons frighten me. I didn't ask questions, just... just got away." She stripped another handful of leaves. Xantcha wanted to tell Ratepe everything, but the words to get her started weren't in her mind.
"The day you bought me, I told you that you were a lousy liar. You may be three thousand years old, Xantcha, but my eight-year-old brother could fib better than you. When he got into trouble, though, I could guess what he was hiding, 'cause I'd hidden it myself. I can't guess about demons."
Xantcha scattered the leafy bits and faced Ratepe. "It was Gix. I smelled sleepers in the sanctuary, I followed the smell, planting spiders as I went, yours and Urza's both. I wound up way underground, in the dark. There was a passageway, one of the big, old, upright ones, and there was Gix."
"You said Gix had been killed in the Sixth Sphere." "The Seventh. He was excoriated, consigned to endless torment. We were taught that nothing escapes the Seventh Sphere." "Another Phyrexian lie? You're sure it was Gix,
not some other demon?"
"Yes." One answer for both questions. "Did he hurt you?"
Ratepe never failed to ask the question Xantcha wasn't expecting. "I'm here, aren't I?"
"Then, what's got you so riled? Why were we headed 'nowhere'? Unless ... wait, I get it now. Urza's sent you off with the mere mortal. He's not that crazed. He knows what I am, who I'm not. He's going back after Gix, and you're here with me instead of-"
"I didn't tell Urza." The words belched out of her.
"You found a Phyrexian demon under Avohir's temple and you didn't tell Urza?"
She turned away in shame.
"Of course," Ratepe sighed. "He'd yell at you and blame you, just as I've yelled at you and blamed you. And you are a lot like my little brother when you get accused of something that's not your fault. And Gix. Gix was the one who got Mishra. Mishra didn't know-not until it was too late. Strange thing. They fought over those two stones that are Urza's eyes now, but I don't think either brother could hear the stones sing."
Xantcha took a deep breath. "Do you wonder why you can hear them."
"I can't hear them. I only hear Mishra's stone. I don't know for sure that the Mightstone sings, but-yes, I do wonder. I think about it a lot, more than I want to. Why? Did Gix say something about the stones?"
"Yes. He said he made them, and then he said something about you." And Urza, Xantcha's mind added, but not her tongue.
Ratepe was pale and speechless.
"He could have gotten your name out of my mind. I was careful what I gave him, enough to keep him from digging too deep. But I got in trouble. Serious trouble." Xantcha's hands were shaking. She clasped them together behind her back. "He had me, Rat. I was walking toward the passageway. I would've gone into Phyrexia, and that would've been the end of me, I'm sure. Then, suddenly, all I could think of was you."
"Me?"
"You're the first 'mere mortal' I've gotten to know. You've..." Blood rushed to Xantcha's face. She was hot, embarrassed, but she stumbled on. "Thinking about you pulled me back. But Gix was in my mind when I did, so he could have taken your name and made a lie around it. Everything he said could've been lies ... probably was lies." And why share Gix's lies with anyone? "He didn't tell me anything I didn't know, except, maybe, about the Thran. And, well, Mishra knew some things about the Thran."
Though Xantcha could feel the blood draining from her own face, Ratepe's was still dangerously pale.
"Tell me what Gix said about me, then what he said about Mishra and the Thran. Maybe I can tell you if it's lies or not."
"Gix said he wondered if I'd found you, as if he'd planned that we were supposed to meet."
"And about the Thran?"
"When I said that Urza would finish what the Thran had started against the Phyrexians, he laughed and said the
Thran were waiting for Urza and that they'd take back what was theirs. Gix was thinking about Urza's eyes-at least, I started thinking about Urza's eyes and how they were the last of the Thran powerstones. Gix laughed louder, and the next thing I knew, I was thinking about you and not walking toward the portal. What he said about you and what he said about me, they're lies. Even if Mishra was compleated in Phyrexia... even if his flesh and blood were rendered for the vats ... I was one of thousands. We were exactly alike. We don't even scar, Ratepe. We couldn't tell ourselves apart!"
"Lies," Ratepe said so softly that Xantcha wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly and asked him to repeat himself. "Lies. The Weakstone's a sort of memory. Mostly it's Mishra's memory, but I've been hit with some Thran memories and some of Urza's, too, though not as strong. With Mishra, there's personality. I'm thankful I never met him while he was alive. He'd've killed me for sure. With the Thran and Urza, it's like faded paintings. But if you were Mishra-if any part of you was Mishra-the Weakstone would have recognized him in you, even though you're Phyrexian. And if I'd been touched by Gix, I'd be dead. The Weakstone doesn't like Phyrexians, Xantcha, and it especially doesn't like Gix."
"Urza's eye doesn't like me?"
Ratepe shook his head, "Sorry, no. It sees you, sometimes, but if Urza doesn't trust you, the Weakstone could be responsible because it doesn't trust you."
"The Weakstone has opinions?"
"Influence. It tries to influence."
Xantcha considered Urza's eyes watching her and Ratepe each time they retreated to her side of the wall. "It must be overjoyed when we're together."
Color returned to Ratepe's face in a single heartbeat. "I'm not Mishra. I make my own opinions."
"What do you know from Mishra and the Weakstone about the Thran and the Phyrexians?" Xantcha asked when Ratepe's blush had spread past his ears.
"They hate each other, with a deep, blinding hate that gives no quarter. But I'll tell you honestly, in the images I've gotten of their war, I can't tell one side from the other. The Thran weren't flesh and blood, no more than the Phyrexians. Even Mishra's just something the Weakstone uses. Urza's notion that the Thran sacrificed themselves to save Dominaria, maybe that's the Mightstone's influence, but it's not true. My world's better off without both of them, Thran and Phyrexians together."
They'd wandered away from their gear. Xantcha headed back. "Maybe Urza will succeed someday in "walking between times as easily as he 'walks between worlds. I'd like to know what really happened back there at Koilos. I'd like to see it for myself. It's a shadow over everything I've ever known, all the way back to the vats."
Ratepe corrected her pronunciation of Koilos, reducing the three syllables to two and moving the accent to the first.
"I heard it from Urza and he's the one who named it," she retorted.
"I guess language drifts in three thousand years. It's still there, you know-well, it was three hundred years ago
when the ancestors left Argive."
Xantcha stopped short. "I thought it wasn't recorded where the first Efuands came from. That's part of your myth."
"It is ... part of the myth, that is. But Father said our language is mostly Argivian and the oldest books, before the Shratta burnt them, had been written in Argivian. And, if you look at a map, Efuan Pincar is about as far away from Argive as you can get without sailing right off the edge."
"And Koilos?" Xantcha stuck with Urza's pronunciation. "It's still there in Argive?"
"It's not in Argivia. It never was, but folk knew where it was three hundred years ago. It's like The Antiquity Wars, something that's not supposed to be forgotten. I guess it was inaccessible for most of the Ice Age, but when the world got warmer again, the kings of Argivia and their neighbors sent folk up on the Kher to make sure the ruins were still ruins."
"Urza's never mentioned them. I just assumed Koilos vanished with Argoth."
"You've seen a map of what's left of Terisiare?"
Xantcha shrugged. There were maps in her copies of The Antiquity Wars. She'd assumed they were wrong and paid no attention to them.
"We'd have to go over the Sea of Laments. We'd never make it there and back in nine days," Ratep
e said with a smile that invited conspiracy. Waste not, want not. If Gix hadn't lied about the young Efuand, they were all doomed.
"We'd make landfall on Argivia in two very cold days and colder nights. Getting back would be more difficult, but it's that or go back to the cottage and tell Urza that I saw Gix in Pincar City."
"He wouldn't be pleased to see us."
* * *
The journey over the Sea of Laments was as uneventful as it was unpleasant. They'd traded for blankets and an oil-cloth sail in a village on Gulmany's south coast. The fisherman who took Xantcha's silver thought she was insane; a little while later, both Ratepe and Xantcha agreed with him, but by then it was too late. They were in the wash of a roaring wind river and remained there until they saw land again. For two days and nights there was nothing to do but huddle beneath blankets and the sail.
"Don't you have to keep one hand free?" Ratepe had shouted early on, as they struggled to wrap the blankets evenly around their feet.
"Tack across this?' she shouted back. "We're here for the ride."
"How many times have you crossed the sea?"
"Once, by mistake."
"Sorry I asked."
Misery ended after sunrise on the third day. There was land below, land as far as the eye could see. Xantcha thought down and thrust her hand through the sphere for good measure. Her hand turned white as they plummeted down to familiar altitudes.
As her hand began to thaw, Xantcha asked, "Now, which
way to Koilos?"
"Where are we?"
"Don't you recognize anything from your maps?"
"Avohir's sweet mercy, Xantcha, maps don't look like the ground!"
They found an oasis and a goatherd who seemed unfazed by the sight of two strangers in a place where strangers couldn't be common. He spoke a language neither of them had heard before but recognized the word Koilos in its older, three-syllable form. He rattled off a long speech before pointing to the southeast. The only words they recognized, beside Koilos, were Urza and Mishra. Xantcha traded a silver-set agate for all the food the youth was carrying. He strode away, whistling and laughing.
