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 affection 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.