"Follow them."

"They're nothing, Rat."

"They're trouble. I smell it."

He knew she detected Phyrexians by scent. She knew his nose wasn't sensitive. "You can't smell trouble, and you can't see it, either. We've got to find an alley where we can set ourselves down without drawing a crowd."

"Xantcha, please? I've just got a feeling about them. I want to know where they're going. I'll stay at the inn. I won't give you any hassle, just-follow them?"

"No complaints when we're stuck hiding in a gully somewhere until after sundown?"

"Not a word."

"Not a sound or a gesture, either," she grumbled, but she shifted her hand and they scooted over the palace wall.

Their quarry stayed along the shoreline, out of side of the guards on the Pincar walls. Ratepe was likely right. They weren't up to any good, but that could mean almost anything, maybe even a meeting with the Shratta. That would be worth knowing about, but she wasn't prepared for confrontation.

"We're not getting involved," Xantcha warned. They'd fallen far enough behind the six men that Xantcha wasn't worried about being overheard. She did worry about sun. Dominaria wasn't a world where large man-made objects routinely whizzed through the sky. Urza's ornithopters, like Urza himself, were remembered mostly for their wrongheadedness. She'd followed men for days and never been noticed, but men who were, as Ratepe proclaimed, trouble, tended to looked over their shoulder frequently and might notice a shadow where one shouldn't be.

"Not unless we have to." "No unlesses, Rat. We're not getting involved." "We've got more than we had when you sent me into a burning village."

True enough. Since she knew there were Phyrexians loose in Efuan Pincar, Xantcha had fattened their arsenal with a variety of exploding artifacts and a pair of firepots. Having protection wasn't the same as using it. She hadn't survived all these centuries by blundering into someone else's trouble.

"We're following them, that's all. In the very unlikely event that they're going to meet with a Phyrexian demon, I'll think about it." She thought about it as long as it took her to spin the sphere around and push it, with all of

her might, toward the opposite horizon.

Although Xantcha and Ratepe could still see the city walls, the riders had reached a point where they were beyond the Pincar guards' sight. Accordingly, they mounted and galloped their horses south.

"They're in a hurry," Ratepe said as Xantcha pushed the loaded sphere to its limit. "I wonder where they're going."

"Not far. Not at that speed."

The laden sphere couldn't keep pace. They lost sight of the riders, but not the dust cloud their horses raised. Xantcha took the opportunity to tack behind them and be in the east with the sun when they caught up again.

"You said you'd follow them!" Ratepe said, as the sphere veered sunward.

"You said no complaints."

"If we were on their tails."

"We're on their sun-side flank, it's safer. Trust me."

As expected, the horses slowed, the dust ebbed, and the sphere carried Xantcha and Ratepe close enough to see that the men had reined in at the grassy edge of an abandoned orchard and dismounted.

"That's odd," Xantcha muttered. A warrior's sunrise ceremony? She'd seen far stranger traditions.

Ratepe had no ideas or comments. Perhaps he was feeling foolish or thinking about the long day ahead of him, hunkered down in a gully, forbidden by his honor to complain. Xantcha tapped him on the shoulder.

"See that spot down there on the grass?"

She pointed at a dark splotch in the west. Ratepe nodded.

"That's our shadow. I want you to keep a watch on it, and if I get careless and it gets close to those men or, especially, their horses, I want you to tell me. We're going in for a closer look."

"I concede that you were right, and I'm a fool. Let's find some shade. The sun's just come up, and I'm sweating already."

"Keep an eye on our shadow."

Xantcha kept the sun squarely on their backs as they floated closer. There was no real danger. She'd been seen elsewhere, even shot at with arrows and spears, none of which could pierce the sphere. Sorcerers were more of a problem. But sorcerers-sorcerers with the power to damage with one of Urza's artifacts-were almost as easy to detect as Phyrexians and rarer than Phyrexians in Efuan Pincar.

As they approached hearing distance, Xantcha reminded Ratepe to be quiet and brought the sphere into the orchard nearest the men who were trampling the grass in a rough circle about ten paces across. She didn't like what she saw.

"If you sincerely believe in your god," she said softly, "start praying that I'm wrong."

"What?"

She held a finger to her lips.

Ratepe wasn't successful with his prayers, or Avohir, the all-powerful Efuand god, was listening elsewhere that morning. They hadn't hovered among the trees for very long when one of the men pulled something black, shiny, and disk-shaped from his saddlebags.

Xantcha made a fist with her non-navigational hand and

swore in the lilting language of a pink-sky world where

curses were considered art.

"Trouble?" Ratepe asked.

The six men had each grabbed onto the disk and were beginning to stretch it across the trampled grass, not the way she'd learned to open an ambulator, but it had been nearly two thousand years since she'd last seen one. Undoubtedly there'd been changes.

"Big trouble. We're going to get involved. That's a passageway to Phyrexia that they're rolling out. Maybe they're going to visit the Ineffable, but more likely, there're sleepers coming in, and we're going to stop them, or die trying. You understand me?"

Xantcha seized Ratepe's shoulder and forced him to look at her. "We either stop those men, or you make damn sure you don't survive, 'cause sleepers won't come through alone, and anything else that comes through that ambulator you don't ever want to meet."

He went bloodless pale beneath his sweat and neither nodded nor spoke.

"Understand?"

"W-what can I do?"

"They're not watching their backs. If we're lucky, we can set up the firepots, then you keep dropping Urza's toys into them, one after another."

Ratepe nodded, and Xantcha curled her fingers, raising the sphere slightly, then backing off to the far edge of the orchard, out of sight of the six men, but well within the firepots' range. She brought it down carefully. The thump of their supplies hitting the ground as the sphere collapsed wasn't loud enough to disturb the birds in the nearest trees.

Xantcha kissed Ratepe once before she yawned out a layer of armor that would make affection pointless. The firepots were tubes shaped roughly like men's boots, with the important difference that when Xantcha unlaced them, their phloton linings glowed. She aimed them from memory. Close would be good enough with the canisters they'd be using. After she'd piled the fist-sized canisters at Ratepe's feet and dumped a pair-one filled with compressed naphtha, the other with glass shards-into the rapidly heating firepots, she handed Ratepe her smaller coin pouch.

"Anyone gets too close, don't bother with your sword, just throw one of these at him and duck."

Then the firepots let loose, and it was time to draw her sword and run.

The Efuands were sword-armed but not armored. Xantcha planned to take one, maybe two, of them by surprise, and hoped that the firepots would do the same, but mostly she hoped that the Efuands would abandon the ambulator before it spat out reinforcements. The first part of her plan went well. She met a man charging through the trees, struggling to draw his sword. Xantcha slew him with a side cut across the gut. It was loud and messy but successful.