Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

held the place of honor. The door was held open by a corpse.

Given who was fighting in Efuan Pincar, Xantcha supposed she shouldn't have been surprised that the temple had become a char-nel house. She counted ten men, each with his hands bound and his throat slit, lying in a common, bloody pool. There were more corpses, similarly bound, sprawled closer to the altar, but she'd spotted Rat staring at a wall before she'd counted them. "We've got to leave."

He didn't twitch. The scabbard was gone; the sword blade was dark and glistening in the temple's gloomy light. Rat had probably never held a sword before Xantcha made him more afraid of her than death. Odds were he'd become a killer, if not a fighter, in the past hour. A man could crack under that kind of strain. Xantcha approached him cautiously. "Rat? Ratepe?"

The wall was covered with bloody words. Xantcha could read a score of Dominarian languages, most of them long- extinct, none of them Efuand. "What does it say?"

"Those who defile the Shratta will be cleansed in their own blood. Blessed be Avohir, in whose name this has been done."'

Xantcha placed her hand over his sword-gripping hand. Without a word, Rat released the hilt.

"If there are gods," she said softly, "then thugs like the Shratta don't speak for them."

She tried to guide Rat toward the door; he resisted, quietly but completely. Mortals, men who were born and who grew old, saw death in ways no Phyrexian newt could imagine, in ways Urza had forgotten. Xantcha had exhausted her meager store of platitudes.

"You knew the Shratta were here, Rat. You must have known what you'd find."

"No."

"I stopped at other villages before I got to Medran. You weren't the first to tell me about the Shratta. This is their handiwork."

"It's not!" Rat shrugged free.

"It's time to leave." Xantcha grasped his arm again.

Rat struck like a serpent but did no harm only because Xantcha was a hair's breath faster in jumping away. She recognized madness on his tear-streaked face.

"All right. Tell me. Talk to me. Why isn't this Shratta handiwork?"

"Him."

Rat pointed at an isolated corpse slumped in the corner between the written-on wall and the wall behind the altar. The man had died because his gut had been slashed open, but he had other wounds, many other wounds, none of which had bled appreciably. Xantcha, who'd fought and sometimes succumbed to her own blind rages, knew at once that this was the man-probably the only man-that Rat had killed.

"All right, what about him?"

"Look at him! He's not Shratta!"

"How do you know?" Xantcha asked, willing to believe him, if he had a good answer.

"Look at his hands!"

She nudged them with her foot. The light was bad, but they seemed ordinary enough to her. "What? I see nothing unordinary."

"The Hands of God. The Shratta are Avohir's Avengers. They tattoo their hands with Shratta-verses from Avohir's holy book."

"Maybe he was a new recruit?"

Rat shook his head vigorously. "It's more than his hands. He's clean-shaven. The Shratta never cut their beards."

Xantcha ran through her memory. Since she'd arrived in Efuan Pincar the only clean-shaven men she'd seen had been in Medran, wearing Red-Stripe tunics, and here where the men she'd fought and the man Rat had killed were beardless.

"So, it's not the Shratta after all? It's Red-Stripes pretending to be Shratta?" she asked.

And knowing that the Phyrexians had invaded the Red- Stripe cadres, Xantcha asked another, silent, question: Had the Phyrexians created their own enemy to bring war and suffering to an obscure corner of Dominaria? If so, they'd learned considerable subtlety since Oix destined her to sleep on another world.

Rat's head continued to shake. "I've seen the Shratta cut through a family like ripe cheese. I saw them draw my uncle's guts out through a hole in his gut: they'd said he'd spilled dog's blood on the book. I know the Shratta, Xantcha, and this is what they'd do, except, this man isn't-and can't be-Shratta."

Keeping her voice calm, Xantcha said, "You said you were gone when the Shratta came through your village. You didn't see anything. It could have been the Red-Stripes."

"Could've," Rat agreed easily. "But I saw my uncle get killed, and I saw it before we left Pincar City, and it was the Shratta. By the book, by the true book, Xantcha. Why would Red-Stripes do this? No one but the Shratta support the Shratta. The people here ... at home, what was home . . . the Shratta would come, real Shratta, and they'd tell us what to do, which was mostly give them everything we had and then some; and they would kill if they didn't get what they wanted." Rat shuddered. "My family were strangers, driven out of Pincar City, but everyone hated the Shratta as much as we did. We'd pray ... we'd all pray, Xantcha, to Avohir to send us red-striped warriors from the cities. The Red-Stripes were our protectors."

"Be careful what you pray for, I guess. It sounds like the Red-Stripes may have been doing the Shratta's dirty work, and leaving behind no witnesses to reveal the truth."

Rat had reached a similar conclusion. "And if that's true, they're not finished with this place. They're waiting outside. They won't have gone away. Everyone here is dead, you and me, too, unless we can kill them all."

"It's worse than that, Rat. Somebody's gone. Somebody's running a report back somewhere." To a Phyrexian sleeper, saying he'd seen a dark-haired youth hovering in a sphere? No, she'd killed the thug who'd seen them in the sphere. But she'd shaken off an arrow. Phyrexians might lack imagination, but they had excellent memories. Somebody might remember Gix's identical newts, especially since Dominaria was the world Phyrexia coveted above all others, the world of her earliest dreams. Urza was right, as usual. She'd lost her temper, and the price could be very high. "We've got to leave."

"Everyone will die!"

"No deader than they'd be if we'd never set foot here."

"But their blood will be on our hands-on my hands, since you don't seem to have a conscience. I'm not leaving."

"There's no point in staying."

"The Red-Stripes will come back. We'll kill them, then we can leave."

"I told you, there's no point. They'll have sent a runner. This village is doomed."

Rat paced noisily. "All right, it's doomed. So after we kill the Red-Stripes that are still outside the village, you take these people, one by one, to other villages, where they can spread the truth and disappear. By the time the runner leads more Red-Stripes here, this place will be empty. It can be done."

"You can't be serious."

But Rat was, and Xantcha had a conscience. It could be done. First came a long, violent night roaming the fields outside the village with her armor and a sharp knife, followed by three days of burying the dead and another five of ferrying frightened survivors to places where they could "spread the truth about the Shratta and the Red-Stripes then disappear." But it was done, and on the morning of the tenth day, after leaving Rat's fetters draped across the defiled altar, they resumed their journey out of Efuan Pincar.

Xantcha guided the sphere with a rigid hand. The Glimmer Moon hung low in the night sky, painfully bright yet providing little illumination for the land below. A dark ridge loomed to the south. On the other side of that ridge there was a familiar cottage with two front doors and the bed in which she expected to be sleeping before midnight.

It was a clear night reminiscent of winter. The air was dead-calm and freezing within the sphere. Her feet had been quietly numb since sundown. Beside her, Rat hadn't said a word since the first stars appeared. She hoped he was asleep.

And perhaps he was, but he awoke when the sphere pitched forward and plummeted toward a black-mirror lake Xantcha hadn't noticed. He'd had nearly two weeks to learn when to tuck his head and keep his terror to himself, but in the dark, with food and whatnot tumbling around them, Xantcha didn't begrudge Rat a moment of panic. In truth, she scarcely noticed his shouts; the plunge caught her unprepared. It was several moments before she heard anything other than her own heart's pounding.