A swordsman attacked Xantcha next. He knocked her down with his first attack but was unnerved when she sprang up, unbloodied. Xantcha parried his next strike with her forearm as she closed in to kick him once in the stomach and a second time, as he crumbled, to the jaw. She paused to pick up the sword, then continued down the street shouting Rat's name, attracting attention.
Two more men appeared in front of her. They knew each
other and the warrior's trade, giving each other room, exchanging gestures and cryptic commands as they approached. The strategy might have worked if Xantcha had been unarmored or if the sword had been her only weapon. Her aim with the coins wasn't as good with her off-weapon hand. Only one struck its target, but that was enough. The other two exploded when they hit the ground, leaving goat- sized craters in the packed dirt.
Her surviving enemy rushed forward, more intent on getting out of the village than fighting. Xantcha swung, but he parried well and had momentum on his side. Xantcha slammed backward into the nearest wall when he shoved her aside. Elsewhere in the village, someone blew three rapid notes on a horn, and a weaponed quartet at the other end of the village street dashed for the gate. For religious fanatics, the Shratta were better disciplined than most armies. Dark suspicion led Xantcha to inhale deeply, but beyond the smoke and the blood, there was nothing Phyrexian in the air.
A straggler ran past. Xantcha let him go. This was Rat's fight, not hers, and she didn't yet know if he'd survived.
"Ra-te-pe!" She used all three syllables of his name. "Ra-te-pe, son of Mideah, get yourself out here!"
A face appeared in the darkened doorway of the barn that had been her destination. It belonged to an older man, armed with a pitchfork. He stepped unsteadily over the doorsill.
"No one here owns that name."
"There'd better be. He's meat if he ran."
Two more villagers emerged from the barn: a woman clutching her bloody arm against her side and a stone-faced toddler who clung to her skirt.
"Who are you?" the elder asked, giving the pitchfork a shake, reminding Xantcha that she held a bare and bloody sword.
"Xantcha. Rat and I were ... nearby." She threw the sword into the dirt beside the last man she'd killed. "He saw the roofs burning."
They still were. The survivors made no effort to extinguish the blazes. A village like this probably had one well and only a handful of buckets. The cottages were partly stone; they could be rebuilt after the fires burnt out.
The elder shook his head. Plainly he didn't believe that anyone had simply been nearby. But Xantcha had laid down her weapon. He shouted an all's well that lured a few more mute survivors from their hiding places.
Still no Rat.
Xantcha turned, intending to investigate the other end of the village. The woman who'd fled-the one who'd seen them descend in the sphere-was on the street behind her. Her reappearance, alive and unharmed, broke the villagers' shock. Another woman let out a cry that could have been either joy or grief.
The returning woman replied, "Mother," but her eyes were locked on Xantcha and her hands were knotted in ward- signs against evil.
Time to find Rat and get moving. Xantcha walked quickly to the other end of the village where a whitewashed temple
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."