"They took your skin, Mishra, and stretched it over one of their abominations. Do you remember? Do you remember them coming for you? Do you remember dying?"
Rat's limp arms and legs began to tremble. Xantcha's breath caught in her throat. She'd never believed that Urza was cruel, merely careless. He'd lived so long in his own mad isolation that he'd forgotten the frailties of ordinary flesh, especially of flesh more ordinary than that of a Phyrexian newt. She was certain that once Urza noticed what was he was doing, he'd relent. He could heal as readily as he harmed.
But Urza didn't notice what he was doing to the youth she'd brought from Efuan Pincar. Rat writhed like a stuck serpent. Blood seeped from his nose. Xantcha threw herself into the golden light.
"Stop!" Xantcha seized Urza's outstretched arm. She might have been a fly on a mountain top for the effect she had. "You're killing him."
Suddenly, Urza's arm hung at his side again. Xantcha
reeled backward, fighting for balance while Rat collapsed.
"There is nothing in his mind. I sought the answers that have eluded me: when did the Phyrexians come for him? Did he fight? Did he surrender willingly? Did he call my name? He has no answers, Xantcha. He has nothing at all. My brother's mind is as empty as yours. I do not understand. I found you too late; the damage had already been done. But how and why has Mishra come back to me if he is not himself, if his mind is not alive with the thoughts I know should be there."
Xantcha knew her mind was empty. She was Phyrexian, a newt engendered in a vat of turgid slime. She had no imagination, no great thoughts or ambitions, not even a heart that could be crushed by humiliation, whether that humiliation came from Urza or Oix.
Rat was another matter. He lay face-down in a heap of awkwardly bent limbs. "He's a man," Xantcha snarled. She'd caught her balance, but kept her distance. Another step closer and she'd be a child looking up to meet Urza's eyes. She was too angry for that. "His mind is his own. It's not a book for you to read and cast aside!"
Xantcha couldn't guess whether Rat was still alive, even when Urza put his foot against the youth's flank to shove him onto his back.
"This is only the first. There will be others. The first is never final; there must always be refinements. If I have learned nothing else, I have learned that. I was working in the wrong direction- thinking that I'd have to reach back through time to find Mishra and the truth. And because I was not looking for Mishra, he could not find me, not as he must find me. But his truth will come to me once I have refined the path. I can see them, Xantcha: a line of Mishras, each bearing a piece of the truth. They will come and come until one of them bears it all." Urza headed to his open door. "There is no time." He stopped and laughed aloud. "Time, Xantcha ... think of it! I have finally found the way to negate time. I will start again. Do not disturb me."
He was mad, Xantcha reminded herself, and she'd been a fool to think she could outwit him. Unlike Rat, Urza never changed his mind. He interpreted everything through the prism of his obsessions. Urza couldn't be held responsible for what had happened.
That burden fell on her.
Xantcha had never kept count of those she'd slain or watched die. Surely there were hundreds ... thousands, if she included Phyrexians, but she'd never betrayed anyone as she'd betrayed Ratepe, son of Mideah. She knelt beside him, straightening his corpse, starting with his legs. Ratepe hadn't begun to stiffen; his skin was still warm.
"There will be no others!" Urza turned around. "What did you say?" "I said, this was a man, Urza. He was a man, born and living until you killed him. He wasn't an artifact on your table that you could sweep onto the floor when you were finished with him. You didn't make him-" She hesitated. Burdened with guilt, she saw that her clever plan to have Ratepe pose as Mishra required confession. "That tabletop didn't reach through the past. I went looking for a man who resembled your brother, I found him, and I brought him here.
"I won't do it again, so there won't-"
"You, Xantcha? Don't speak nonsense. This was my brother- the first shadow of my brother. You could not have found him without me."
"I'm not speaking nonsense! You had nothing to do with this, Urza. This was my idea, my bad idea. His name was never Mishra. His name was Ratepe, son of Mideah. I bought him from a slaver in Efuan Pincar."
Urza appeared thunderstruck. Xantcha leaned forward to straighten Ratepe's other leg. Efuands buried their dead in grass-lined graves that faced the sunrise. She'd helped dig several of them. There was a suitable spot not far from her window where she'd see it easily and lament her folly each time she did.
Unless she left ... soared back to Efuan Pincar to do battle with the Phyrexians in Ratepe's name. If the cyst would still respond to her whims. If Urza didn't destroy her when his thoughts finally made their way back to the world of life and death.
She reached for Ratepe's crooked arm.
"A slaver? You sought my brother's avatar in a slaver's pens?"
Avatar-a spirit captured in flesh. Xantcha recognized the word but had never consciously used it; it was the right word, though, for what she'd wanted Ratepe to become. "Yes." She straightened Ratepe's elbow. "Mishra was a Fallaji slave."
"Mishra was advisor to the qadir."
"Mishra was a slave. The Fallaji captured him before you got to Yotia; they never freed him-not formally. It's in The Antiquity Wars. He told Kayla, and she wrote down his words."
Xantcha had never told Urza about her chest filled with copies of his wife's epic. He hadn't asked, hadn't volunteered any sense of his past here in his home, except what arose from his tabletop artifacts. He didn't appear pleased to hear Kayla's name falling off her tongue. Xantcha sensed she was living dangerously, very dangerously.
She took Ratepe's hand. It was stiff; rigor had begun. Gently, she uncurled his fingers.
They resisted, tightened, squeezed.
Before she could think, Xantcha jerked her hand away-or tried to. Ratepe didn't let go, and she stayed where she was, kneeling beside him, breathless with shock. She looked down. He winked, then kept both eyes shut.
"Waste not, want not," she whispered and cast her glance quickly in Una's direction but Urza was elsewhere.
"I did not tell you to read that story." His voice came from a cold place, far from his heart. "Kayla Bin-Kroog never knew the truth and did not write it, either. She chose to live in a mist, with neither light nor shadow to guide her. You cannot believe anything in The Antiquity Wars, Xantcha, especially about Mishra. My wife saw her world through a veil of emotions. She saw people, not patterns, and when she saw my brother ..." He didn't finish his thought, but offered another: "She didn't mean to betray me. I'm sure she thought she could be the bridge between us; it was too late. I honored Harbin, but after that, it was all lies between us. I couldn't trust her. You
can't either."
Before Xantcha could say that Kayla's version of the war made more sense, Ratepe sat bolt upright.
"I've heard it said that there's no way a man can be absolutely certain that his wife's child is his and only one way he can be cer-tain that it's not. Kayla Bin-Kroog was an attractive woman, Urza, and wiser than you'll know. She did try to become a bridge, but not with her body. She was tempted. I made certain she was tempted, but she never succumbed, which, my Brother, begs one almighty question: How and why are you so certain Harbin was not your son?"