Planeswalker

by Lynn Abbey

  But the food was good. They devoured roast lamb with sweet herbs, a thick grainy paste that tasted of nuts and

  saffron, honey-glazed bread, and an overflowing jug of the berry wine served only for the Festival of Fruits. It wasn't worth the silver they'd paid for it, but it was good nonetheless, and they hauled the remaining wine up to the top of the stairs when they were finished.

  The garret overhung a blind alley, but a bit of acrobatics put them on the roof and gave them one of the better views of the plaza that Pincar had to offer. A breeze stirred the humid air, making it pleasant. In the plaza, Avohir's book remained open on the dais. Red-Stripes stood guard while priests took turns reciting Shratta verses from memory-or so Ratepe said. Their voices didn't reach the top of the guild inn.

  The crowd had thinned, and what remained had settled in around ten or fifteen campfires scattered across the cobblestones. Red-Stripes stood guard outside the palace and the temple. Xantcha wondered who held the allegiance of the men who guarded the inns. Not that it mattered overmuch. The sky was open to her sphere if they had to get away in a hurry.

  "This is a good place," she decided. "We can see everything that's important, and there's nothing to block the sphere if we need it. We'll watch tomorrow night from here."

  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 ki
ng 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.

  Could Gix have ordered a search that had removed her handiwork? The Phyrexian presence in Avohir's temple had been noticeably less tainted with the glistening oil scent when Xantcha had made her second visit to Pincar City and all but absent this past afternoon.

  But if the demon had scoured the temple walls, wouldn't he have checked the Red-Stripe barracks, too, or the plaza itself? Were compleat Phyrexians truly lacking in suspicious imagination?

  There was a flurry around the dais. The holy readers were no longer reciting, and other priests had joined them, getting in one another's way as they closed the great book

  and made haste to get the litter poles beneath it. That would explain Ratepe's distress. He didn't want Avohir's book inside the sanctuary when-if-the altar collapsed.

  But there was more she should worry about: Red-Stripes cadres had spilled from the barracks and the temple. They began, ruthlessly, to restore order in the swirling crowd. Their only opposition came from those other Red-Stripes who'd turned on the disabled sleepers when the spiders began to scream. It seemed that some sleepers and Phyrexians hadn't been affected by Urza's artifacts or, even more incredibly, that some Efuands had so embraced Phyrexian aspirations that they pursued them even after the Phyrexians had fallen.

  Xantcha grabbed Ratepe's sleeve and made him face her.

  "What's happening down there?" she demanded. "Is it over? Can I unplug my ears?"

  He shrugged helplessly and, consumed by frustration, Xantcha stuck a finger in one ear.

  The spiders hadn't stopped screaming, and breaking the seal that protected her from their power was an instant, terrible mistake. Xantcha lost all awareness and sense of herself until she was on her back. Ratepe knelt over her, pressing his fingers against her ears. One
hand was bloody when she felt strong enough to push them both away. Ratepe helped her stand.

  The situation had changed in the plaza. Some of the second wave of Red-Stripes had succumbed to the spiders' screaming. They were literally torn apart by the Efuand mob, and gruesome though that was to watch, it was also instructive. The resistant Red-Stripes were more compleat than Xantcha or the already fallen sleepers. Beneath their seemingly mortal skins they had bones of metal, wired sinews, and veins that spilled glistening oil onto the cobblestones.

  The oil did truly glisten in malevolent shades of green and purple until someone discovered, as Urza had discovered a very long time ago, that glistening oil burned.

  A slow-moving question that was not her own passed through Xantcha's mind, and Ratepe's, too-he staggered and might have fallen from the roof, if Xantcha hadn't grabbed him. Across the plaza, most Efuands were not so fortunate, though they had less far to fall. All whom Xantcha could see shook themselves back to their senses and stood up unharmed. None of the Efuands, including Ratepe, could know what had happened, but Xantcha, who knew a demon's touch when she felt it, looked for a strand of ruby red light and found it sweeping through the smoke above the burning oil.

  Gix.

  Xantcha's hand rose to her throat. She broke the crystal. Ratepe watched her do it; he asked questions she couldn't hear, and she answered with the demon's name.

  Avohir's sweet mercy! She read the prayer from Ratepe's lips.

  In the plaza, the frantic priests of Avohir had finally slung the litter poles beneath the holy book in position to carry the volume back to the sanctuary. That building had still to show any signs of damage from the shatter'Spiders. The sanctuary might not show such damage to observers on the guild-inn roof. They hadn't expected or intended to bring the great outer walls down, merely the altar and a

  dormitory cloister behind the sanctuary. And, of course, the spiral stairway down to the crypt.

  Xantcha didn't know whether to relax or ratchet her apprehension tighter when the priests successfully navigated through the plaza throng, and Avohir's holy book disappeared into the sanctuary. Ratepe was obviously more anxious, but his lips moved too quickly for her to read his words, even after she'd asked him to slow down and speak distinctly.