by Lynn Abbey
Then something happened to make Ratepe put his hands over his ears. All across the plaza, Efuands hitherto unaffected were reacting to a painful noise, but there were no Red-Stripes-no Phyrexians-to take advantage of them. All of them, sleepers and compleat, those already dead and those still alive, simply exploded, bursting like sun- ripened corpses. Sound, as Urza had promised, with the power to shake glistening oil until it pulled apart. The Glimmer Moon had struck its zenith. Everything until that moment had been mere forewarning.
Xantcha's whole body tingled from the inside out. If Urza's armor failed, she'd be dead before she knew she was endangered. She tried to imagine the scenes in all the other cities where she and Urza had planted the spiders. Born Dominarians on their knees, as Ratepe was, perhaps spattered with blood that glistened malevolently in the moonlight. All of them wondering if it were their turn to die.
The Red-Stripe barracks collapsed and, through her feet, Xantcha heard the ground wail. A cloud of dust as large as the guild inn billowed through sanctuary doors, a cloud that rose quickly to hide the temple and half the plaza from Xantcha's view. When dust had settled some, she and every Efuand saw that the great dome above the altar and the gong tower-shadows in the night moments earlier- were both missing.
From his knees, Ratepe lowered his hands and pounded the roof with his fists. A god who couldn't protect his book or his sanctuary was apt to lose the faith of his worshipers. Xantcha didn't know the depth of Ratepe's faith, but she guessed it had been shaken to its roots.
It was shaken further when an intense red glow filled Avohir's sanctuary, overflowing through the open doors, the windows, and the roof. Xantcha saw the wotd fire on Ratepe's lips, but the light wasn't fire. It was Gix.
Xantcha broke the chain that had held Urza's pendant around her neck. She held the crystal up in the crimson light. Very clearly, it was broken and, just as clearly, Urza wasn't coming. He hadn't said where he'd go to watch the Glimmer Moon strike its zenith. He could have gone to the Glimmer Moon itself or he could have remained in the Ohran Ridge cottage.
Or Urza's absence could mean that Gix was not the only demon on Dominarian soil and that Urza was already in a desperate brawl. Urza could 'walk anywhere, but even he couldn't be in two places at once.
The red light within Avohir's sanctuary grew brighter, larger. It fluctuated and emitted serpentine flares that faded slowly in the night. The smell of Phyrexia grew steadily stronger. Xantcha imagined Gix burning and battering his way up from the catacombs. She wondered if he
had the power to destroy a city and didn't doubt for a heartbeat that the demon would, if he could.
There was nothing Xantcha could do to stop Gix, and until she was sure that the spiders were exhausted, there was nothing she dared do to spirit herself and Ratepe away.
Vast crimson fingers leapt from the roofless sanctuary. They soared into the sky, then arched toward the plaza. Looking up, Xantcha and everyone else saw that the fingers were hollow, filled with darkness and fanged like serpents. The darkness resembled the upright passageway to Phyrexia that she'd seen in the crypt. Xantcha feared they'd all be sucked into the Fourth Sphere. Ratepe put his arms around her, and Xantcha wrapped hers around him. She wanted to feel his warm, mortal flesh with her fingers and wouldn't have cared if the spiders killed her, except that she wouldn't force Ratepe to watch her die.
She saw a ribbon of silvery light emerge from the center of palace. Diving and soaring, the palace light pierced each serpent and drew them all together with a choking knot before dragging them over the north wall and out to sea.
Xantcha shouted, "Urza!" at Ratepe who needed a few more heartbeats before he could shape his lips around the name.
Gix fought back, but as Xantcha had always suspected, Urza was more than a match for a Phyrexian demon ... or a Thran one. Neither duelist was visible from the plaza or the roof, though they each knew exactly where the other was. They fought with light and fire, with artifacts and creatures that defied naming in any language Xantcha knew. Gix would have lost quickly if the demon had not aimed most of his destruction at the Efuand survivors in the plaza and thereby forced Urza to defend the innocent.
Then Urza loosed two weapons at once: bolts of lightning to counter Gix's last cowardly thrust and a dragon shaped like the one he'd ridden into Phyrexia, but shaped from golden light. Stars shone through the dragon's wings, but its power was anything but illusory. A jet of intense blue fire shot from its mouth as it began a stoop that would take it into Gix's sanctuary lair.
Gix didn't die fighting; nor did he retreat to Phyrexia. Instead he abandoned Pincar City altogether: a relatively small green-gold streak racing to the south, a half-breath ahead of the dragon's flame.
Xantcha expected the dragon to pursue Gix over the horizon, but it continued its stoop into the ruined sanctuary. She braced herself for the physical shock wave of a crash that never came. A heartbeat, and another, and the dragon lifted into flight again, showing first its wings, then its spidery torso, and at last, clasped in a pair of legs, a book that recently had seemed very large and now looked quite small. The dragon beat its translucent wings twice for altitude. Then it stooped again and set Avohir's holy book on the battered dais before climbing back into the sky.
The dragon circled out to sea-Avohir's home according to myth-and the Efuands still standing, including Ratepe, set up a cheer in its wake, but Urza wasn't finished. He brought the dragon back (Xantcha would have sworn he shrank it just a bit, too) for a gentle glide over the palace
roofs. Through its bright, shifting light, Xantcha wasn't sure it had picked something up until it was almost overhead and she could see a frail old man getting the ride of his life.
It was a miracle of another sort that Tabarna's heart didn't fail before the dragon set him down beside Avohir's book. The dragon flew straight up after that and disappeared among the stars.
The Efuands who'd cheered the survival of their book, went wild when they saw their king. Xantcha couldn't get Ratepe's attention no matter how hard she pounded his back or how loudly she shouted, "Is it over? Can I release Urza's armor?"
Yes, it's over, Xantcha. Urza's voice spoke to Xantcha's thoughts.
You heard! she replied, releasing the armor and pulling the wax out of her ears. You came! The cheers of the crowd, after total silence, were as deafening as the spiders.
Xantcha had trouble hearing Urza when he said, still in her mind, I've been here all along, keeping my eyes on Gix. I didn't want to frighten you.
Waste not, want not. How long had Urza known?
Xantcha hadn't kept her thoughts private. Urza pulled the question from her mind and answered it. Since the priest in the orchard. I went back to all the haunted places. I saw how the Phyrexi-ans had crept into my world again. I found Tabama in a ceil beneath the palace-he was quite mad, but still himself. The Phyrexians needed to trot him out periodically, and they could only do what they did to Mishra because he carried the Weakstone. So I stole Tabarna from them and hid him on another plane.
That, I confess, was the act that brought Gix here to Pincar City. Since then, everything I've done-everything I've had you do-has been building toward this moment. I healed Tabama. Madness, you know, sinks deep roots in a man's soul once he's seen sights and thought thoughts no man should see or think. There are some moments he'll never remember again, moments such as I wish I could forget, Xantcha. The Shratta could not be deceived, so they were killed while Tabama watched. But he'll live another ten years and sire another son or two. I guarantee it.
Xantcha had warned her slave, assume that if you've thought about it Urza knows it. Then she had failed to remember her own advice.
"You've had reason to be suspicious, Xantcha. There's never been anyone who could do for me what I've done for Tabarna."
Urza was on the roof with them, looking very ordinary. He had no trouble getting Ratepe's attention but was unprepared when Ratepe threw himself into a joyous, tearful embrace.
The affec
tion Efuands had for their elderly king-whose speech none of them could hope to hear through their shouting- was nothing Xantcha wanted to understand, though it was also clear that Urza had done exactly what was necessary to insure that the realm would recover from its long battering.
Xantcha stood a bit apart from Ratepe and Urza, giving herself a few moments to consider all that she'd just learned. She stayed apart when Urza extended his hand.
"What happens next?" she demanded thinking deliberately of Gix.
"I go to Koilos."
She folded her arms. "Not alone. Not if you're going after Gix."
Urza frowned, then sighed. "No, I suppose not." He turned to Ratepe. "And you, Brother, I suppose you'll want to come, too."
CHAPTER 24
The sun just had risen over the Kher Ridge, far to the east of Gulmany island and Efuan Pincar. It would be a summer day with clear air and high clouds that wouldn't come close to raining on these desert-dry stones. Koilos, the Secret Heart, was on the other side of the mountain where Xantcha and Ratepe rested, waiting for Ratepe to recover from the three-step 'walk from Pincar City. Urza was already at the cavern. He'd sworn he wouldn't go looking for Gix until they arrived, unless Gix came looking for him.
Ratepe sat on the ground, chafing his arms and legs against the morning chill and the shock of healing.
"You think he knows everything?"
Xantcha had just finished telling him what had passed between her and Urza on the guild-inn roof not an hour earlier. She was impatient to yawn out the sphere and get into the air, even though she knew there'd be no part for her or Ratepe to play in the coming fight. More than three thousand years ago she'd watched as other demons thrust Gix down a fumarole to punishment that had proved less than eternal. She expected Urza to do a better job and wanted to watch him doing it.
"He's still calling you Mishra."
Ratepe nodded several times. "True enough. But he was something in the sky last night over Pincar City-a little while ago- whenever. I got used to the idea that he was the crazed, foolish man who lived on the other side of the wall. I let myself forget what I knew he was, through the Weakstone. He was the man who came within an hour of destroying the world."
"You weren't the only one," Xantcha confessed. "You ready to finish this?"
"All in a morning's work," Ratepe joked grimly as he stood. "Avohir's mercy, I should be happy. I am happy, but inside, I feel like I felt after I saw my father dead, or when we were falling through that storm over the ocean and we were floating in your sphere. I don't feel a part of anything that's around me. If I ask myself what happens next, there's nothing there, not even a sunrise."
Xantcha replied, "Urza 'walked us under the sun. That's why we missed the sunrise, and I'll try not to drop the sphere through a storm again.'' She left Ratepe's other observations behind on the ground as the sphere flowed around them and lifted them into the air.
Urza waited not far from the place where Xantcha had read the Thran glyphs. He was taller than any mortal man and clad in his full panoply with robes armored in the colors of sorcery. His hand circled the gnarled wood of a war staff capped with a peculiar blue-gray metal. His eyes
were hard and faceted, as if he'd see nothing so puny as flesh, but his voice was strong and vibrant when he greeted them.
"Gix is here, waiting for me."
The scents of Phyrexia were indeed in the air: glistening oil, Fourth Sphere fumes, and the malevolence Xantcha recognized as Gix. She yawned out her armor while Urza laid hands on Ratepe's shoulders. The young Efuand glowed like swamp water once they entered the cavern. Sunlight ended ten paces into the upper, glyph-covered chamber. Urza's war staff emitted a steady light from the edges of its many blades. The light reached to the glyph- covered walls.
"Phyrexian, you say?" Urza asked.
"Close enough. Do you want to read them through my eyes?"
"Not yet. After. I've waited too long to taste vengeance against the Phyrexian who destroyed my brother. It's hard enough to know that Gix is one of the Thran, one of the ones who got away, I don't want to know the rest, not yet. And once I know it, then I'll decide if it's worth remembering. I have much to do, Xantcha. I cannot always embrace the truths that might be written on stone walls. I know that's been hard for you, but it's been even harder for me."
The ultimate confession from the crazed and foolish man who lived on the other side of the wall?
They continued to the rear of the chamber, where Ratepe had spotted a passage. Without torches or powerstone eyes, he had been unable to explore it. The passage sloped steeply downward and was marred by deep gouges in the stone. Xantcha walked on Urza's left, a half-pace behind. Ratepe held a similar place on Urza's right.
"We took everything," Ratepe whispered, softly, but in Koilos a whisper carried like a shout. Urza didn't tell him to be quiet, so Ratepe continued. "The chamber below, where we found the stones, we stripped it bare. We needed the metal. At the end we were so desperate for metal, any metal, that we opened tombs and took the grave goods from our dead and fueled our smelters with their bones."
"So did we," Urza assured him. "So did we."
Xantcha saw light ahead, the harsh, gray light of Phyrexia.
The second chamber of Koilos was as large as the first and empty, except for Gix who stood somewhat behind dead center. Xantcha expected some preliminary taunting and boasting, but neither Urza nor Gix was a young mortal with an itch for glory. They'd come to kill or be killed. All their whys had been buried long ago.
Gix attacked first as they emerged from the passageway. He didn't waste time or effort with side attacks against Xantcha or Ratepe. They weren't innocents with rights to Urza's protection. They'd come of their own free will, and they'd be meat, at best, if Urza failed to win.
The rubine gem in the demon's bulging forehead shone bright. A thumbnail-sized spot of the same color appeared on Urza's breast. Heartbeats later, a boulder, Urza high and Urza wide, bilious green and glassy, stood where Urza had stood between Xantcha and Ratepe. The boulder blew apart an instant later. Fists of stone hammered Xantcha
from face to toes and threw her back against the chamber wall. Ratepe was on the floor, covered in a thick layer of dust. Two counterspinning coils of fire and light whirled around the demon until he spread his arms to vanquish them.
An ambulator took shape, closer to Urza than to Oix. The ambulator heaved and rotated upward, sprouting a toothy hole of a mouth and many viscous, reaching arms. An arm came close enough to Xantcha that she judged it prudent to put a little distance between herself and the duel. She scuttled crabwise along the curving chamber wall and was relieved to see Ratepe do the same on the other side.
Urza spoke a word, and the ambulator-creature became a sooty smear. He did nothing at all that Xantcha could see, and yet Gix was slammed against the chamber's far wall. A crystal sarcophagus surrounded the demon. Xantcha thought that might be the end, but purple fumes rose from the crystal, and Urza disappeared as manic wailing filled the barren chamber. Gix shook off the dissolving crystal and clambered to his metallic feet.
Xantcha took heart from the fact that the demon wasn't claiming victory by targeting her or Ratepe. His oddly shaped head swiveled frantically. The rubine light danced over the naked stone, leaving a trail of smoke as Gix sought a target. Twice the demon blew futile craters in the rock, but he was ready when ghostly blue arms seized him from behind. Urza landed on his back in the middle of the chamber. The impact shook jagged stones the size of a man's torso from the ceiling.
Both combatants righted themselves and backed away from each other.
The testing phase was over; the duel began in earnest with flurries of attacks that ebbed and flowed too fast for Xantcha's eyes. The demon was stronger, cleverer, and much more resilient than she'd believed after seeing him flee the dragon in Pincar City. She thought of the excoriation. It had taken a clutch of demons to wrestle Gix into that fumarole. She suspected that he was the only one who'd survived.
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Urza succeeded in melting away one of Gix's legs, though that was little more than inconvenience in a battle that wasn't about physical injury. And though Urza seemed to have the advantage more often than not, he couldn't deliver a killing attack. Not that he didn't try a in a hundred different ways from elemental ice to conjured beasts and the ghosts of artifacts he and Mishra had wielded against each other. Gix countered them all, sometimes barely, with an equally bewildering assortment of arcane memories and devices.
Eventually, when it had become apparent that neither flash nor guile was going tilt the balance, Urza and Gix locked themselves in a contest of pure will that manifested itself in an increasingly complex web of blue-white and crimson light. The spindle-shaped web stretched between Urza's eyes and Gix's gem-studded forehead. At its widest, which was also its middle and the middle of the chamber, the web did not descend to the floor. Sparing nothing for effect, the web gave off neither heat nor sound and endured, without really changing, until Xantcha had to breathe again.
How long, she asked herself, could they remain enrapt
in each other? Her best answer: for a very long time. She got up on her feet.
"Look at Urza's eyes!" Ratepe shouted from the other side of the chamber.
Xantcha had to walk closer than she considered wise before she found a slit in the web that let her look down the spindle to Urza's face. She didn't see anything strange-nothing stranger than two specks as bright as the sun-but she didn't have Ratepe's rapport with the Weakstone. And, as Ratepe's voice had seemed to have no effect on the duel, she asked, "What am I looking for?"
"You can't see everything changing ... coming back from the past, or going back to it?"
She started to say that she couldn't see anything changing and swallowed the words. Shadows were growing in the Koilos chamber. Not shadows cast by the web's light, but shadows cast by time, growing more substantial as each moment passed. Metal columns grew along the walls. Great machines, worthy of Phyrexia, loomed up from the floor.