Free Planeswalker by Lynn Abbey Page B

slave to recognize his new name; nor was she prepared for
his aggressive insolence. I've made a mistake, she told
herself. I've done a terrible thing. Then Mishra started
choking. He tugged on the tight leather band around his
throat and managed to gulp down his mouthful of bread. His
fingers came away stained with blood and pus.
    Xantcha looked at her own feet. She might have made a
mistake, but she hadn't done anything terrible.
    "You may call me Xantcha. And when you meet him, Urza
is just Urza. He would not like to be called Master,
especially not by his brother."
    "Xantcha? What kind of name is that? If I'm Mishra and
you work for Urza, shouldn't your name be Tawnos? You're a
little bit small for the part. Grow out your hair and you
could play Kayla-an ugly Kayla. By the love of Avohir, I
was better off with Tuck-tah and Garve."
    "You know The Antiquity Wars?"
    "Surprised? I can read and write, too, and count
without using my fingers." He held up his hand but saw
something-the stains, perhaps, that she'd already noticed-
that cracked his insolence. "I wasn't born a slave," he
concluded softly, staring across the plaza at his memories.
"I had a life ... a name."
    "What name?"
    "Rat."
    "What?" she thought she'd misunderstood.
    "Rat. Short for Ratepe. I grew into it." Another
snorted laugh-or maybe a strangled sob. Either way, it
ended when the neck leather brought on another choking
spell.
    "Hold still," Xantcha told him and drew out her knife
again. "I don't want to cut you."
    There wasn't even a flicker of trust in Rat's eyes as
she laid the blade against his neck. He winced as she slid
it beneath the leather. She had to saw through the sweat-
hardened leather and pricked his skin a handful of times
before she was done. The tip was bloody when it emerged on
the other side, but he didn't make a grab for her or the
weapon.
    "I'm sorry," she said when she was finished.
    Xantcha raised her arm to hurl the collar away as she'd
hurled the manacles. Rat caught the trailing leash. The
leather fell into his lap.
    "I'll keep it."
    Xantcha knew that in the usual order of such things,
slaves didn't have personal property, but she wasn't about
to take the filthy collar away from him. "I have a task for
you," she said as he worried the collar between his hands.
"I would have offered you the gold, if you'd been free. You
will be free, I swear it, when you've done what I need you
to do."
    "And if I don't?"
    While Xantcha wrestled with an answer for that
question, a noisy claque of Red-Stripes entered the plaza
from the east, the direction through which Xantcha had
hoped to leave. She and
    Rat were far from alone on the cobblestones, and she
reasonably hoped that despite their mismatched appearance-
him in rags and weeping sores, her with her boots and
sword-they wouldn't draw too much attention. Rat saw the
Red-Stripes as well. He snapped the leather against his
thigh like a whip.
    Red-Stripes, Xantcha guessed, had something to do with
his transformation from free to slave. Considering his
apparent education and remembering the farmer's gesture,
she wondered if he'd once worn the sort of garments she was
wearing.
    "Hold it in," she advised him. "You've got a chain...."
She left the thought incomplete as a gentle breeze brought
her the last scent she ever wanted to smell: glistening
oil.
    One of the Red-Stripes was a sleeper, a newt like her,
but different, too. Newts of this new invasion had born-
folk ways and didn't clump together in cadres. In truth,
they didn't seem to know they were Phyrexian. Xantcha
didn't care to test her theory. She hunched on her knees as
she sat, catching her breath in her hands, hiding the
exhalations that might reveal her glistening scent. She
couldn't relax or be too careful.
    Beside Xantcha, Rat beat a counterpoint of curses and
leather. There was a chance that the Red-Stripe sleeper
could hear every word.
    "Quiet!" Xantcha hissed a command as she