Planeswalker (40 page)

They stayed on the roof until the temple gongs sounded
again at midnight and the Red-Stripes escorted the huge
holy book into Avohir's sanctuary.

"What do they do if it rains?" Xantcha asked as they
swung and slipped back to the garret.

If the roof had been pleasant, their rented room was a
prison. Leaving the windows open had attracted swarms of
buzzing, biting insects without improving the air. The
excuse for a bed smelled as if its last occupant had been a
corpse, and a summertime corpse at that. Xantcha seriously
considered yawning out the sphere, if only for Ratepe's
sake. She'd breathed Phyrexian air, the ultimate standard
by which foul air should be judged, and survived without a
wheeze or cough. Poor Ratepe was sneezing himself inside
out and short of breath. In the end they dragged the best
of the blankets up to the roof and bedded down beneath the
stars.

The day they'd been waiting for began before dawn with
more gongs clanging from the temple as the Festival of
Fruits started its fourth day. When the city gates opened,
the tent encampments disgorged their pilgrims who were, on
the whole, far less hardened than the men who'd held sway
in the plaza at night. There were children and flower
sellers and all the other things Ratepe remembered from his
own childhood. He coaxed Xantcha out of the garret for
bowls of berries and a second visit to Avohir's great
sanctuary.

The line of petitioners waiting for Avohir to dry their
tears was prohibitively long and the cloister passage to
the priests' quarters and, ultimately, the crypt where
she'd confronted Gix was closed off and guarded by the
burliest Red-Stripes she'd seen since arriving in the city.
They glistened with oily sweat, but they weren't Phyrexian.

"I can't believe they're all gone but that one I
scented last night with the litter," Xantcha mused when
Ratepe had finished taking her on a brief tour of the

sanctuary. "Maybe Gix had pulled the sanctuary sleepers
back. It doesn't take much practice to be a bully like a
Red-Stripe, but a priest has to do things right."

"You put the spiders where they live-"

"I'd feel better if I'd seen that they were still in
place."

"We'll find out soon enough," Ratepe replied with the
sort of fatalism Xantcha herself usually brought to any
discussion.

They were on the temple porch, looking down at the
plaza from a different angle and gazing north at an
afternoon storm. There was time for one more bowl of
berries before the storm swept over the palace. Xantcha was
indifferent to sweets, but Ratepe would have eaten himself
sick. She saw what they did with Avohir's book when it
rained. A team of priests who'd obviously worked together
before scrambled to get the great book closed and covered
with a bleached sail.

"It's going to get wet and ruined sooner or later," she
pointed out as she and Ratepe climbed the five flights of
narrow, rickety stairs to the garret.

"Sooner."

"But isn't it too precious to be mistreated like that?"

"It used to be there was a new Book every five years. I
think the one they've got is maybe older than that. But
it's not any one specific copy of the Book that matters,
it's the idea of Avohir's book and the wisdom it contains.
When a new Book's brought into the temple, the old one is
cut up and passed out. Some people say if you burn a piece
of the Book on New Year's Day, you'll have a better year,
but some people-my father, for one-kept his scraps in a
special box." Ratepe fell silent and stared out the window
at the rain.

"Lost?" Xantcha asked.

"We brought it with out of the city. I didn't even
think about it after the Shratta." He went back to staring.

"Should I buy a duck?" Xantcha asked, quite serious.

"A duck?"

"Six days after the Festival of Fruits, you'll be
nineteen. I made sure I remembered. You said your mother
roasted a duck."

"We'll see after tonight."

The festival crowds never recovered from their
afternoon soaking. Hundreds of Efuands had returned to
their tents beyond the walls, and the rowdy, mean-spirited
element took over the plaza long before the midsummer sun
was ready to set. Xantcha and Ratepe were spotted standing
on the roof, silhouetted by the sun. The innkeeper, a man
as burly as the sanctuary Red-Stripes reminded them in no
uncertain terms that they'd rented the garret. For an
additional two silver bits they rented the roof as well.
The innkeeper offered to send up supper and another jug of
berry wine.

Xantcha had had her fill of berries. They ate with the
other guests in the commons, another leisurely, overpriced
meal, then retreated to the roof for the spectacle. The
western sky was blazing, and there were two brawls in the
plaza, one strictly among the revelers, the other between
the revelers and what appeared to be a cornered pair of
Red-Stripes. A different, more strident set of gongs was

struck, and a phalanx of mounted warriors thundered out of
the palace, maces raised and swords drawn.

She couldn't decipher the details of the skirmish from
the rooftop, but it wasn't long before three corpses were
dragged away and a handful of men, bloodied and staggering,
were marched into the palace. One of the prisoners wore an
empty sword belt. He wasn't a Red-Stripe; that besieged
pair had vanished back into the cadres. By his straight
posture and arrogant air, even in defeat, the prisoner
looked to be a nobleman, the first of that breed Xantcha
had seen since arriving in Pincar City.

The nobleman's appearance crystallized a conclusion
that had been lurking in Xantcha's thoughts. "Efuan Pincar
has lost its leaders," she suggested to Ratepe. "Wherever I
look, whether at the Red-Stripes, the temple, or that mob
down there, I don't see anyone taking charge. If there are
leaders, they're giving their orders in secret and then
watching what happens from a distance, but they're not
leading from in front."

Ratepe had an explanation for that absence. "Efuan
Pincar's not like Baszerat and Morvern and places like that
where every man, woman and child answers to a lord. Our
Ancestors left that way behind at the Founding. It's
written in Avohir's book. We have a season for making
decisions, wintertime, when the harvest's been gathered and
there's time to sit and talk-"

" Where's your king? Where's Tabarna? When I came here
twenty years ago, he was visible. If there'd been riots
outside his palace, the way there've been last night and
tonight, he'd have been out here. If not him, then someone,
a high priest, a nobleman, even a merchant. There were men
and women who could speak louder than the mob. Look down
there. Folk have been killed, and there's no true reaction.
There's anger everywhere, but nobody's gathering it and
turning it into a weapon."

"Efuands aren't sheep. We think for ourselves." Ratepe
countered quickly, a reply that had the sound of an
overleamed lesson.

"Well, it's strange, very strange. It's not like
anything I've seen before, and that doesn't happen very
often. And it's not the way Efuand Pincar was twenty-odd
years ago. Your king or someone would be visible. Efuands
may not be sheep, Ratepe, but without leaders to stop them,
I don't wonder that the Red-Stripes and Shratta were able
to cause such trouble for you."

"Are you saying Phyrexians were with the Shratta and
the Red-Stripes from the start?"

Ratepe was incredulous, sarcastic, but as soon as
Xantcha thought about her answer, she realized, "Yes, I am.
I found Gix in Avohir's crypt, but I probably could have
found him in the palace just as easily."

"Do you think he's still here?"

"He might be. That passageway I saw wasn't like an
ambulator. But Gix was too big to chase me up the stairs.
If he's here, he's not going to come walking through the
sanctuary doors."

Ratepe said nothing as the sunset aged from amber to
lavender. Then, in little more than a whisper, he said, "In
the war, Urza and Mishra's war, the Brotherhood of Gix made
themselves useful to both sides. They pretended to be

neutral. Neither Mishra nor Urza questioned them, but they
answered to Gix, didn't they? The Gix in Avohir's temple.
The Gix who made you. He controlled the brotherhood, and
the brotherhood manipulated the brothers. Avohir's sweet
mercy, Gix-the Phyrexians-did control that war. Kayla Bin-
Kroog said never to forget the mistakes we made, but she
didn't suspect the real rot..." His voice trailed off,
then returned. "It's happening again, isn't it? Here and
everywhere. And nobody's seeing it come."

"Urza has." Xantcha let out a pent-up breath. "Urza's
mad in a thousand different ways, but he does remember, and
he has learned. He knows to fight this war differently. He
knows not to make the old mistakes. I've been listening to
him, but I wasn't watching him. Urza lies to himself as
much as he lies to you or me, but that hasn't stopped him
from doing what has to be done. Until now. I've got to go
back, Ratepe, after tonight. I've got to find him and tell
him about Gix and about the Thran. There's a part of him
that needs to know-deserves to know-everything that I
know."

"You won't go alone, will you?"

"Efuan Pincar's going to need true leaders."

"True, but for Efuan Pincar's sake, Urza needs a Mishra
that I can trust."

The Glimmer Moon was the evening star this midsummer
season, far brighter than the star Ratepe called the Sea-
Star and Xantcha called Berulu. It pierced the deepening
twilight like a faintly malevolent diamond. Every world
that Xantcha remembered where sentient races came together
to talk and create societies, folk looked overhead and
recited myths about the stars, the moon, and the wanderers.

Gulmany was no exception, but the Glimmer Moon was. It
was bright, it wandered, everybody saw it, everybody knew
it, and by some unspoken agreement, nobody included it in
their myths. Like a loud, uninvited guest, the Glimmer Moon
was acknowledged across the island with averted eyes and
silence.

Even knowing what an important part it would play this
evening, neither Xantcha nor Ratepe could look at it for
long, and the pall it cast effectively ended their
conversation.

Other, friendlier stars made their nightly appearance.
Avohir's gongs clanged to announced the holy book's
procession from the sanctuary altar to the white-draped
dais. Xantcha found herself breathing in painful gasps,
expecting the spiders to scream while the litter was in
transit. She clutched Urza's waxen lumps in her fists and
had the mnemonic for his armor on the edge of her mind. But
the Glimmer Moon didn't strike its zenith in the night's
early hours.

She couldn't truly relax after the book was on the dais
and the priests had begun to recite whatever passages
tradition declared appropriate for the fourth night of the
Festival of Fruits. The memory of her one exposure to the
spiders kept her nerves jangled. Urza had been steadily
increasing the range and power of his tiny artifacts. What
if the combination of wax and armor weren't enough? The
level part of the roof where they stood was a small square,
three paces on a side, twelve in all, which she traced,
first to the left, then to the right.

"Stop pacing, please!" Ratepe begged. "You're making me
nervous, and you're making me dizzy."

Xantcha couldn't stand still, so she slid over the edge
of the roof and into the garret, where the usable pacing
area was somewhat smaller. She'd worked up a clinging sweat
before thousands of insects got between her ears and her
mind. She put the wax plugs into her ears and got Urza's
armor out of the cyst within a few heartbeats, but not
before she was gasping on the floor.

Ratepe appeared in the garret window just as she'd
recovered enough to stand. He grabbed her hand. Xantcha
could feel his excitement, but she'd become deaf even to
her own voice. They didn't need words, though, to return to
the roof where Ratepe's swinging arm showed her where to
look for already fallen sleeprs.

They'd gotten lucky, she thought, observing in sterile
silence. Some of the Efuand Red-Stripes must have known
there were Phyrexians within their cadres. How else to
explain the swiftness with which the standing Red-Stripes
distanced themselves from their fallen comrades or, in one
instance that unfolded in the torch-lit area in sight of
the guild inn's roof, turned their weapons on one of their
own?

From the beginning Ratepe had been concerned with the
problem of how unaffected folk might interpret the sleeprs'
collapse. The issue seemed to be resolving itself more
favorably, if also more violently, than either he or
Xantcha dared hope.

She could see men and women whose mouths were moving,
and she wished she could ask Ratepe what they were
shouting. Probably she could have asked; it was the hearing
of the answer that no wish could grant her.

The first of the shatter spiders did its damage as a
section of the Red-Stripe barrack collapsed. She could see
the destruction from the roof, which was higher than the
first of several walls that encircled the palace. The folk
in the plaza wouldn't have seen anything, but they might
have heard the walls fall, or the inevitable shouts as
flames poked through the rubble. Overturned lamps and such
finished what the shatter-spiders had begun.

In all, Xantcha thought, it was going very well. She
was surprised that Ratepe wasn't visibly jubilant. She
tried to ask him with gestures and the old hand code that
she and Urza had devised and that, lacking foresight of
this moment, she'd failed to teach him. Ratepe pointed
toward Avohir's temple, where the shatter-spiders had yet
to produce any obvious damage and no priests, sleeper or
otherwise, were visible in the pools of torchlight.