struck, and a phalanx of mounted warriors thundered out of the palace, maces raised and swords drawn.
She couldn't decipher the details of the skirmish from the rooftop, but it wasn't long before three corpses were dragged away and a handful of men, bloodied and staggering, were marched into the palace. One of the prisoners wore an empty sword belt. He wasn't a Red-Stripe; that besieged pair had vanished back into the cadres. By his straight posture and arrogant air, even in defeat, the prisoner looked to be a nobleman, the first of that breed Xantcha had seen since arriving in Pincar City.
The nobleman's appearance crystallized a conclusion that had been lurking in Xantcha's thoughts. "Efuan Pincar has lost its leaders," she suggested to Ratepe. "Wherever I look, whether at the Red-Stripes, the temple, or that mob down there, I don't see anyone taking charge. If there are leaders, they're giving their orders in secret and then watching what happens from a distance, but they're not leading from in front."
Ratepe had an explanation for that absence. "Efuan Pincar's not like Baszerat and Morvern and places like that where every man, woman and child answers to a lord. Our Ancestors left that way behind at the Founding. It's written in Avohir's book. We have a season for making decisions, wintertime, when the harvest's been gathered and there's time to sit and talk-"
" Where's your king? Where's Tabarna? When I came here twenty years ago, he was visible. If there'd been riots outside his palace, the way there've been last night and tonight, he'd have been out here. If not him, then someone, a high priest, a nobleman, even a merchant. There were men and women who could speak louder than the mob. Look down there. Folk have been killed, and there's no true reaction. There's anger everywhere, but nobody's gathering it and turning it into a weapon."
"Efuands aren't sheep. We think for ourselves." Ratepe countered quickly, a reply that had the sound of an overleamed lesson.
"Well, it's strange, very strange. It's not like anything I've seen before, and that doesn't happen very often. And it's not the way Efuand Pincar was twenty-odd years ago. Your king or someone would be visible. Efuands may not be sheep, Ratepe, but without leaders to stop them, I don't wonder that the Red-Stripes and Shratta were able to cause such trouble for you."
"Are you saying Phyrexians were with the Shratta and the Red-Stripes from the start?"
Ratepe was incredulous, sarcastic, but as soon as Xantcha thought about her answer, she realized, "Yes, I am. I found Gix in Avohir's crypt, but I probably could have found him in the palace just as easily."
"Do you think he's still here?"
"He might be. That passageway I saw wasn't like an ambulator. But Gix was too big to chase me up the stairs. If he's here, he's not going to come walking through the sanctuary doors."
Ratepe said nothing as the sunset aged from amber to lavender. Then, in little more than a whisper, he said, "In the war, Urza and Mishra's war, the Brotherhood of Gix made themselves useful to both sides. They pretended to be
neutral. Neither Mishra nor Urza questioned them, but they answered to Gix, didn't they? The Gix in Avohir's temple. The Gix who made you. He controlled the brotherhood, and the brotherhood manipulated the brothers. Avohir's sweet mercy, Gix-the Phyrexians-did control that war. Kayla Bin- Kroog said never to forget the mistakes we made, but she didn't suspect the real rot..." His voice trailed off, then returned. "It's happening again, isn't it? Here and everywhere. And nobody's seeing it come."
"Urza has." Xantcha let out a pent-up breath. "Urza's mad in a thousand different ways, but he does remember, and he has learned. He knows to fight this war differently. He knows not to make the old mistakes. I've been listening to him, but I wasn't watching him. Urza lies to himself as much as he lies to you or me, but that hasn't stopped him from doing what has to be done. Until now. I've got to go back, Ratepe, after tonight. I've got to find him and tell him about Gix and about the Thran. There's a part of him that needs to know-deserves to know-everything that I know."
"You won't go alone, will you?"
"Efuan Pincar's going to need true leaders."
"True, but for Efuan Pincar's sake, Urza needs a Mishra that I can trust."
The Glimmer Moon was the evening star this midsummer season, far brighter than the star Ratepe called the Sea- Star and Xantcha called Berulu. It pierced the deepening twilight like a faintly malevolent diamond. Every world that Xantcha remembered where sentient races came together to talk and create societies, folk looked overhead and recited myths about the stars, the moon, and the wanderers.
Gulmany was no exception, but the Glimmer Moon was. It was bright, it wandered, everybody saw it, everybody knew it, and by some unspoken agreement, nobody included it in their myths. Like a loud, uninvited guest, the Glimmer Moon was acknowledged across the island with averted eyes and silence.
Even knowing what an important part it would play this evening, neither Xantcha nor Ratepe could look at it for long, and the pall it cast effectively ended their conversation.
Other, friendlier stars made their nightly appearance. Avohir's gongs clanged to announced the holy book's procession from the sanctuary altar to the white-draped dais. Xantcha found herself breathing in painful gasps, expecting the spiders to scream while the litter was in transit. She clutched Urza's waxen lumps in her fists and had the mnemonic for his armor on the edge of her mind. But the Glimmer Moon didn't strike its zenith in the night's early hours.
She couldn't truly relax after the book was on the dais and the priests had begun to recite whatever passages tradition declared appropriate for the fourth night of the Festival of Fruits. The memory of her one exposure to the spiders kept her nerves jangled. Urza had been steadily increasing the range and power of his tiny artifacts. What if the combination of wax and armor weren't enough? The level part of the roof where they stood was a small square, three paces on a side, twelve in all, which she traced, first to the left, then to the right.
"Stop pacing, please!" Ratepe begged. "You're making me nervous, and you're making me dizzy."
Xantcha couldn't stand still, so she slid over the edge of the roof and into the garret, where the usable pacing area was somewhat smaller. She'd worked up a clinging sweat before thousands of insects got between her ears and her mind. She put the wax plugs into her ears and got Urza's armor out of the cyst within a few heartbeats, but not before she was gasping on the floor.
Ratepe appeared in the garret window just as she'd recovered enough to stand. He grabbed her hand. Xantcha could feel his excitement, but she'd become deaf even to her own voice. They didn't need words, though, to return to the roof where Ratepe's swinging arm showed her where to look for already fallen sleeprs.
They'd gotten lucky, she thought, observing in sterile silence. Some of the Efuand Red-Stripes must have known there were Phyrexians within their cadres. How else to explain the swiftness with which the standing Red-Stripes distanced themselves from their fallen comrades or, in one instance that unfolded in the torch-lit area in sight of the guild inn's roof, turned their weapons on one of their own?
From the beginning Ratepe had been concerned with the problem of how unaffected folk might interpret the sleeprs' collapse. The issue seemed to be resolving itself more favorably, if also more violently, than either he or Xantcha dared hope.
She could see men and women whose mouths were moving, and she wished she could ask Ratepe what they were shouting. Probably she could have asked; it was the hearing of the answer that no wish could grant her.