"I know, but I'm going to the palace. Straight to
Tabarna, if he's there, whether he's a man or something
else. Every Efuand has the right to petition our king. If
he's a man, I'll tell him the truth."
Xantcha planned her reply as she set aside a mug of
cold tea. "And if he isn't?" She'd learned from Urza, truth
and logic were worthless with madmen. It was always better
to let them rant until they ran themselves down.
"Then they'll kill me, and you'll have to tell Urza
what happe-nen, and maybe then he'll do something."
She grimaced into her tea. "That's a burden I don't
want to carry. So, let's assume you survive. Let's assume
you're face-to-face with Tabarna. What truth will you tell
your king?"
"I will tell him that Efuands must stop killing
Efuands. I'll tell Tabarna what the Red-Stripes have done."
"Very bold, but with or without Phyrexians, your king
already knows what the Red-Stripes are doing in the
Shratta's name."
"He can't..." Ratepe's voice trailed off. He'd seen too
much in his short life to dismiss her out of hand.
"He must."
"Not Tabarna. He wouldn't. If he's still in Pincar
City, if he's still a man, then he thinks what I thought,
that it's all the Shratta. He doesn't know the truth. He
can't."
Xantcha sipped her tea. "All right, Rat, assume you're
right. The king of Efuan Pincar, a man like yourself, still
sits on his throne. He doesn't know that there are
Phyrexians among his Red-Stripe guards. He doesn't know
what those red-striped thugs have done. He doesn't know
that, in all likelihood, the Shratta were the first to be
exterminated. If Tabarna doesn't know any of this exists,
then who else in Efuan Pincar does? And how has this
nameless, faceless person kept your king in ignorance all
these years?"
Ratepe's whole face tightened in uncomfortable silence.
"No." not a denial, but a prayer, "Not Tabarna."
"Best hope that Tabarna is skin stretched over metal.
You'll hurt less, when the time comes, if you're not
fighting a man who sold his soul to Phyrexia. In the
meantime, until I know where the Phyrexians are and who
they are, we will rely on Urza's pebbles and you will stay
out of trouble and danger."
Ratepe wasn't happy. He wasn't stupid, either. After a
slight nod, he busied himself folding his blanket.
That day's journey was easier and much quieter. Ratepe
spent most of their time aloft staring at the horizon, but
there were no tears and Xantcha let him be. Most of her
journeys had been taken in silence, and though she'd
quickly grown accustomed to Ratepe's company and
conversation, old habits returned quickly.
She brought them over the Pincar City walls in the
darkness between moon set and sunrise six days later. The
sky was clear, the streets were deserted, and the guards
they could see were more interested in staying awake until
the end of their watch than in a dark speck moving across a
dark sky. Xantcha decided to risk a pass above the palace.
Few things were as useful as a bird's eye view of
unfamiliar territory.
A few slow-moving servants were at work in the
courtyards, getting a jump on their chores before the sun
rose. Sea breezes and frequent showers kept the coastal
city livable in the summer, but the air was always moist
and if a person had the choice, work was easier done before
dawn than in mid-afternoon.
Xantcha was building a mind-map of the royal
apartments, servant quarters, and bureaucratic halls when
Ratepe tugged on her sleeve and drew her attention to the
stables. His lips touched her hair as he whispered.
"Trouble."
Six men, cloaked head to toe but otherwise unmarked,
led their horses toward the postern gate-the palace's
private gate. Probably it wasn't anything significant.
Palaces throughout the multiverse had similarly placed
gates because royal affairs sometimes required the sort of
discretion that others might call deceit. But while it was
still dark they were in no danger of being seen. Xantcha
wove her fingers, and the sphere floated behind the men.
The tide was out, exposing a narrow rocky spit between
the ocean and the harbor. The not-unpleasant tang of
seaweed and salt-water mud permeated the sphere. Xantcha
took a deep breath. No glistening oil. Whoever the six
cloaked men were, they weren't Phyrexian.
"Messengers," she decided softly and the sphere began
to drift backward with the sea breeze.
"Follow them."
"They're nothing, Rat."
"They're trouble. I smell it."
He knew she detected Phyrexians by scent. She knew his
nose wasn't sensitive. "You can't smell trouble, and you
can't see it, either. We've got to find an alley where we
can set ourselves down without drawing a crowd."
"Xantcha, please? I've just got a feeling about them. I
want to know where they're going. I'll stay at the inn. I
won't give you any hassle, just-follow them?"
"No complaints when we're stuck hiding in a gully
somewhere until after sundown?"
"Not a word."
"Not a sound or a gesture, either," she grumbled, but
she shifted her hand and they scooted over the palace wall.
Their quarry stayed along the shoreline, out of side of
the guards on the Pincar walls. Ratepe was likely right.
They weren't up to any good, but that could mean almost
anything, maybe even a meeting with the Shratta. That would
be worth knowing about, but she wasn't prepared for
confrontation.
"We're not getting involved," Xantcha warned. They'd
fallen far enough behind the six men that Xantcha wasn't
worried about being overheard. She did worry about sun.
Dominaria wasn't a world where large man-made objects
routinely whizzed through the sky. Urza's ornithopters,
like Urza himself, were remembered mostly for their
wrongheadedness. She'd followed men for days and never been
noticed, but men who were, as Ratepe proclaimed, trouble,
tended to looked over their shoulder frequently and might
notice a shadow where one shouldn't be.
"Not unless we have to." "No unlesses, Rat. We're not
getting involved." "We've got more than we had when you
sent me into a burning village."
True enough. Since she knew there were Phyrexians loose
in Efuan Pincar, Xantcha had fattened their arsenal with a
variety of exploding artifacts and a pair of firepots.
Having protection wasn't the same as using it. She hadn't
survived all these centuries by blundering into someone
else's trouble.
"We're following them, that's all. In the very unlikely
event that they're going to meet with a Phyrexian demon,
I'll think about it." She thought about it as long as it
took her to spin the sphere around and push it, with all of
her might, toward the opposite horizon.
Although Xantcha and Ratepe could still see the city
walls, the riders had reached a point where they were
beyond the Pincar guards' sight. Accordingly, they mounted
and galloped their horses south.
"They're in a hurry," Ratepe said as Xantcha pushed the
loaded sphere to its limit. "I wonder where they're going."
"Not far. Not at that speed."
The laden sphere couldn't keep pace. They lost sight of
the riders, but not the dust cloud their horses raised.
Xantcha took the opportunity to tack behind them and be in
the east with the sun when they caught up again.
"You said you'd follow them!" Ratepe said, as the
sphere veered sunward.
"You said no complaints."
"If we were on their tails."
"We're on their sun-side flank, it's safer. Trust me."
As expected, the horses slowed, the dust ebbed, and the
sphere carried Xantcha and Ratepe close enough to see that
the men had reined in at the grassy edge of an abandoned
orchard and dismounted.
"That's odd," Xantcha muttered. A warrior's sunrise
ceremony? She'd seen far stranger traditions.
Ratepe had no ideas or comments. Perhaps he was feeling
foolish or thinking about the long day ahead of him,
hunkered down in a gully, forbidden by his honor to
complain. Xantcha tapped him on the shoulder.
"See that spot down there on the grass?"
She pointed at a dark splotch in the west. Ratepe
nodded.
"That's our shadow. I want you to keep a watch on it,
and if I get careless and it gets close to those men or,
especially, their horses, I want you to tell me. We're
going in for a closer look."
"I concede that you were right, and I'm a fool. Let's
find some shade. The sun's just come up, and I'm sweating
already."
"Keep an eye on our shadow."
Xantcha kept the sun squarely on their backs as they
floated closer. There was no real danger. She'd been seen
elsewhere, even shot at with arrows and spears, none of
which could pierce the sphere. Sorcerers were more of a
problem. But sorcerers-sorcerers with the power to damage
with one of Urza's artifacts-were almost as easy to detect
as Phyrexians and rarer than Phyrexians in Efuan Pincar.
As they approached hearing distance, Xantcha reminded
Ratepe to be quiet and brought the sphere into the orchard
nearest the men who were trampling the grass in a rough
circle about ten paces across. She didn't like what she
saw.
"If you sincerely believe in your god," she said
softly, "start praying that I'm wrong."
"What?"
She held a finger to her lips.
Ratepe wasn't successful with his prayers, or Avohir,
the all-powerful Efuand god, was listening elsewhere that
morning. They hadn't hovered among the trees for very long
when one of the men pulled something black, shiny, and
disk-shaped from his saddlebags.
Xantcha made a fist with her non-navigational hand and
swore in the lilting language of a pink-sky world where
curses were considered art.
"Trouble?" Ratepe asked.
The six men had each grabbed onto the disk and were
beginning to stretch it across the trampled grass, not the
way she'd learned to open an ambulator, but it had been
nearly two thousand years since she'd last seen one.
Undoubtedly there'd been changes.
"Big trouble. We're going to get involved. That's a
passageway to Phyrexia that they're rolling out. Maybe
they're going to visit the Ineffable, but more likely,
there're sleepers coming in, and we're going to stop them,
or die trying. You understand me?"
Xantcha seized Ratepe's shoulder and forced him to look
at her. "We either stop those men, or you make damn sure
you don't survive, 'cause sleepers won't come through
alone, and anything else that comes through that ambulator
you don't ever want to meet."
He went bloodless pale beneath his sweat and neither
nodded nor spoke.
"Understand?"
"W-what can I do?"
"They're not watching their backs. If we're lucky, we
can set up the firepots, then you keep dropping Urza's toys
into them, one after another."
Ratepe nodded, and Xantcha curled her fingers, raising
the sphere slightly, then backing off to the far edge of
the orchard, out of sight of the six men, but well within
the firepots' range. She brought it down carefully. The
thump of their supplies hitting the ground as the sphere
collapsed wasn't loud enough to disturb the birds in the
nearest trees.
Xantcha kissed Ratepe once before she yawned out a
layer of armor that would make affection pointless. The
firepots were tubes shaped roughly like men's boots, with
the important difference that when Xantcha unlaced them,
their phloton linings glowed. She aimed them from memory.
Close would be good enough with the canisters they'd be
using. After she'd piled the fist-sized canisters at
Ratepe's feet and dumped a pair-one filled with compressed
naphtha, the other with glass shards-into the rapidly
heating firepots, she handed Ratepe her smaller coin pouch.
"Anyone gets too close, don't bother with your sword,
just throw one of these at him and duck."
Then the firepots let loose, and it was time to draw
her sword and run.
The Efuands were sword-armed but not armored. Xantcha
planned to take one, maybe two, of them by surprise, and
hoped that the firepots would do the same, but mostly she
hoped that the Efuands would abandon the ambulator before
it spat out reinforcements. The first part of her plan went
well. She met a man charging through the trees, struggling
to draw his sword. Xantcha slew him with a side cut across
the gut. It was loud and messy but successful.
One down, five to go.
The firepots, whose trajectory was more height than
distance, delivered both of Urza's exploding artifacts
within twenty paces of the ambulator. They'd spooked the
horses; all six had torn free and bolted, but the naphtha
had fallen beyond the black pool, and the glass hadn't
disabled any of the four men-two still at work anchoring
the ambulator, two with their swords drawn and coming after
her-that Xantcha could see.
Two more canisters came hissing out of the morning
sunlight. One fell on the rippling pool and vanished before
it exploded. No time to imagine where it might have gone or
what it might accomplish when it arrived. The second spread
more glass shards near the two men working on the portal's
rim. If she survived, Xantcha planned to tell Urza that
glass shards weren't effective against Efuands. Though
bloodied and clearly in pain, the pair stayed put.
Four plus one was only five. Xantcha hoped Ratepe
remembered the coins. Then she put him out of her mind. The
swordsmen positioned themselves between her and the other
pair of Efuands. She knew what they saw: an undersized
youth with an undersized sword and no apparent armor. She
knew how to take advantage of mis-perception. Her arm
trembled, the tip of her sword pointed at the ground, and
then she ran at the nearer of the pair.
He thought he could beat her attack aside with a simple
parry. That was his last mistake. The other thought he had
an easy stroke across the back of her neck. He struck hard
enough to drop Xantcha to one knee, but he'd been expecting
more and failed to press what little advantage he had.
Xantcha pivoted on her knee, got her weight behind the
hilt, and thrust the blade up through his stomach to his
heart.