"If the Shratta are men of Avohir, then I spit on

Avohir. Better to be damned than live in the Shratta's fist."

That was the sort of fatal, futile sentiment that Xantcha understood, but she was less pleased to hear Rat declare, "When your Urza's done with me, I'll make my way to Pincar City and join the Red-Stripes. They've got the right idea: kill the Shratta. There's no other way. They'd sooner die than admit they're wrong, so let them die."

"There are Phyrexians among the Red-Stripes," Xantcha warned. "They're a much worse enemy than any Shratta."

"They're not my enemy, not if they're fighting the Shratta."

"Mishra may have thought the same thing, but it is not so simple. Flesh cannot trust them, because Phyrexia will never see flesh as anything but a mistake to be erased."

Rat watched her quietly.

"Flesh. We're flesh, you and I," Xantcha pinched the skin on her arm, "but Phyrexians aren't. They're artifacts. Like Urza's, during the Brothers' War ... only, Phyrexians aren't artifacts. Their flesh has been replaced with other things, mostly metal, according to the Ineffable's plan. Their blood's been replaced with glistening oil. So it should be. Blood cannot trust Phyrexians because blood is a mistake."

His eyes had narrowed. They studied a place far beyond

Xantcha's shoulder. Urza talked about thinking, but he rarely did it. Urza either solved his problems instantly, without thinking, or he sank in the mire of obsession. Rat was changing his mind while he thought. Xantcha found the process unnerving to watch.

She spoke quickly, to conceal her own discomfort. "Flesh, blood, meat-what does it matter? Phyrexia is your enemy, Rat. The Brothers' War was just the beginning of what Phyrexia will do to all of Dominaria, if it can. There are Phyrexians in the Red-Stripes, and you'd be wiser, far wiser, to join the Shratta in the fight against them."

"It's just ..." Rat was thinking even as he talked. His mind changed again and he met Xantcha's eyes with an almost physical force. "You said you smelled Phyrexians among the Red-Stripes. My nose is as good as my eyes, and I didn't smell anything at all. You said 'flesh cannot trust them,' but everybody was flesh, even Tucktah and Garve. On top of all, your talk about me pretending to be Mishra, for someone you call Urza. Something's not true, here."

"Do you think I'm lying?" Xantcha was genuinely curious.

"Whatever you smelled back in Medran, it scared you, because it was Phyrexian, not because it was Red-Stripe. So, I guess you're telling the truth, just not all of it. Maybe we're both flesh, Xantcha, but, Avohir's truth, you're not my sort of flesh."

"I bleed," Xantcha asserted, and to prove the point drew the knife from her boot and slashed a fingertip.

It was a deep cut, deeper than she'd intended. Bright blood flowed in a steady stream from finger to palm, from palm over wrist, where it began to stain her sleeve.

Rat grimaced. "That wasn't necessary," he said, pointedly look-ing beyond the sphere; the first time he'd done that. Eventually a person would face his fears, provided the alternatives were worse. "You'd know where to

cut yourself."

Xantcha held the knife hilt where Rat would see it. He turned further away.

"You were thinking murder not long ago," she reminded him. "Bashing me so you could escape."

Rat shook his head. "Not even close. When my family left

Pincar City ... My father learned to slaughter and butcher meat each fall, but I never could. I always ran away, even last year."

He shrank a little, as if he'd lost a bit of himself by the admission. Xantcha returned the knife to her boot.

"You believe me?" she asked before sticking her bloody finger in her mouth.

"I can't believe you, even if you're telling the truth. Urza the Artificer. Mishra. Smelling Phyrexians. This ... this thing-" He flung his hand to the side, struck the sphere, and recoiled. "You're too strange. You look like a boy, but you talk ... You don't talk like anyone I've ever heard before, Xantcha. It's not that you sound foreign, but you're not Efuand. You say you're not an artifact and not Phyrexian. I don't know what to believe. Whose side are you on?"

"Urza's side ... against Phyrexia." Her finger hadn't stopped bleeding; she put it back in her mouth.

"Urza's no hero, not to me. What he did thirty-four hundred years ago, his gods should still be punishing him for that. You throw a lot of choices in front of me, all of them bad, one way or another. I don't know what to think."

"You think too much."

"Yeah, I hear that all the time... ." Rat's voice trailed off. Whoever had chided him last had probably been killed by the Shratta. All the time had become history for him, history and grief.

Xantcha left him alone. Her finger was pale and wrinkled. At least it had stopped bleeding. They'd been soaring due west in the grasp of a gentle, drifting wind. Clouds were forming to the north. So far the clouds were scattered, fluffy and white, but north of Efuan Pincar was the Endless Sea where huge storms were common and sudden. Xantcha used her hands to put the sphere on a southwesterly course and set it rising in search of stronger winds.

Belatedly, she realized she had Rat's undivided attention.

"How do you do that?" he asked. "Magic? Are you a sorcerer? Would that explain everything?"

"No."

"No?"

"No, I don't know how I do it. I don't know how I walk, either, or how the food I eat keeps me alive, but it does. One day, Urza handed me something. He said it was a cyst, and he said, swallow it. Since it came from Urza, it was probably an artifact. I don't know for sure because I never asked. I know how to use it. I don't need to know more, and neither will you."

"Sorry I asked. I'm just trying to think my way through this." "You think too much."

She hadn't meant to repeat the comment that had jabbed his memory, but before she could berate herself, Rat shot back: "I'm supposed to be Mishra, aren't I?"

He'd changed his mind again. It was possible that a man, a true flesh-and-blood man, not like Urza, couldn't think too much.

The sphere found the stronger winds and slewed sideways. Xantcha needed full concentration to stop the tumbling. Rat curled up against her with his head between his knees. To the north, clouds billowed as she watched. It was unlikely that they could outrun the brewing storm, but they could cover a lot of territory before she had to get them to shelter. There would, however, be a price.

"It's going to be fast and a little bumpy while we run the wind-stream. You ready?"

Taking Rat's groan for assent, Xantcha angled her hand west of southwest, and the sphere leapt as if it had been shot from a giant's bow. If she'd been alone, Xantcha would have pressed both hands against the sphere's inner curve and let the wind roar past her face. She figured Rat wasn't ready for such exhilaration and kept her guiding hand sheltered in her lap. The northern horizon became a white mountain range whose highest peaks were beginning to spread and flatten against an invisible ceiling.

"Somebody's going to get wild weather tonight," Xantcha said to her unresponsive companion. "Maybe not us, but someone's going to be begging Avohir's mercy."

She guided the sphere higher. Beneath them, the ground resembled one of Urza's tabletops, though flatter and emptier: a few roads, like rusty wire through spring-green fields, a palisaded village of about ten homesteads tucked in a stream bend. Xantcha considered her promise to replace Rat's rags and, implicitly, to have his fetters removed.

If she set the sphere down, the storm might keep them down until tomorrow. If she kept the sphere scudding, they'd cut a half-day or more off the journey. And by the amount of smoke rising from the village, the inhabitants were burning their fields-hardly a good time for strangers to show up asking favors. Xantcha swiveled her hand south of southwest, and the sphere bounced onto the new tack.