The Spiders Scream in Pincar City
Chapter 23 is the longest chapter in the book and it earns every page. This is the climax of the Efuan Pincar storyline, the screaming spiders storyline, and the Gix storyline all at once. Buckle up.
The Festival of Fruits
Urza walks Xantcha and Ratepe to Pincar City for the Festival of Fruits. It’s supposed to be berries and music and families. Seven days of celebration. Ratepe grew up with this festival.
But the city they find is not the city Ratepe remembers. Houses are empty or shuttered with iron straps. The neighborhoods are dead quiet. The festival crowd in the great plaza is sullen and mean. Mostly men looking for fights. The Red-Stripes patrol with halberds. There was a time when Efuan Pincar had visible leaders who would step into a crowd and calm things down. Those leaders are gone.
Xantcha sees it clearly. “Efuan Pincar has lost its leaders.” Nobody is taking charge. Not the king, not the priests, not the nobility. The Red-Stripes and whatever’s left of the Shratta have gutted the city’s ability to govern itself.
Ratepe argues that Efuands think for themselves. Xantcha points out that without someone to stop them, the Red-Stripes and Shratta wouldn’t have been able to cause this much damage. And she realizes something important: the Phyrexians have been here from the very start. Not just the Red-Stripes. Not just the Shratta. Gix himself has been pulling strings.
The Night Everything Happens
They rent a garret above a guild inn. It overlooks the plaza. The innkeeper charges them double for roof access. They eat roast lamb and berry wine and try to pretend this is a normal evening.
The Glimmer Moon rises. Avohir’s great book gets paraded out to its dais by priests and Red-Stripe guards. One of the Red-Stripes in the procession is a sleeper. Xantcha can smell him.
She paces until the spiders start screaming. When the sound hits, Xantcha barely gets the wax plugs in her ears and Urza’s armor activated in time. Even through the protection, she’s gasping on the floor.
From the rooftop, she watches the results in silence. Red-Stripes start dropping. And here’s what’s wild: some of the other Red-Stripes already knew they had Phyrexians in their ranks. They turn on their fallen comrades immediately. In at least one case, standing Red-Stripes execute one of their own before the spiders even finish.
A second wave of Red-Stripes pours from the barracks. Some of these drop too. The Efuand mob tears them apart and discovers that underneath their human skin, these Phyrexians have metal bones, wired sinews, and veins that spill glistening oil. Someone figures out the oil burns.
Then Gix makes his move.
The Demon Rises
A slow question passes through every mind in the plaza. Not Xantcha’s question. Not anyone’s. It’s Gix, reaching out from beneath Avohir’s temple. Xantcha recognizes the demon’s touch. She looks for the ruby red light and finds it sweeping through smoke above the burning oil.
She breaks the emergency crystal. Urza doesn’t come.
Vast crimson fingers leap from the roofless sanctuary into the sky. They arch toward the plaza, hollow and fanged like serpents, filled with darkness that looks like the passageway to Phyrexia. The whole city is about to get pulled into the Fourth Sphere.
Then a ribbon of silver light shoots out of the palace and chokes the crimson fingers, dragging them out to sea.
Urza.
He fights Gix over the city. Light against fire. Artifacts against arcane memories. Gix tries to aim his destruction at the crowd, forcing Urza to split his attention between fighting and protecting innocents. Then Urza sends a dragon. Not a real dragon. A dragon made of golden light, with stars shining through its wings. It breathes blue fire and dives at the ruined sanctuary.
Gix doesn’t fight to the death. He runs. A small green-gold streak racing south with the dragon’s flame at his heels.
The Dragon and the Book
But Urza isn’t done showing off. The dragon doesn’t chase Gix. It dives into the sanctuary and comes back up carrying Avohir’s holy book in its claws. It sets the book gently on the battered dais. Then it circles out to sea and comes back for one more pass over the palace, carrying the frail old king Tabarna. It sets him down beside the book.
The Efuands go wild. Their king is alive. Their book is saved. The dragon disappears among the stars.
Urza appears on the rooftop next to Xantcha and Ratepe. He tells Xantcha he’s been in Pincar City the whole time. He’s known about Gix since the Phyrexian priest in the orchard a year ago. He went back to every haunted place. He found Tabarna imprisoned beneath the palace, mad from what the Phyrexians had done to him, and healed him on another plane.
Everything Xantcha agonized about telling Urza, he already knew. Everything she did planting spiders and distributing artifacts, he was watching. He orchestrated all of it.
“There’s never been anyone who could do for me what I’ve done for Tabarna,” he says, and it’s the closest he’ll ever come to acknowledging that he’s broken in ways he can’t fix himself.
Then he says, “I go to Koilos.”
Xantcha folds her arms. “Not alone. Not if you’re going after Gix.”
Ratepe steps up too. And Urza, for once, doesn’t argue.
This chapter is a spectacle, but it’s grounded by the character work Abbey does in between the explosions. Xantcha watching from the rooftop, deaf from the spiders, reading lips, trying to make sense of chaos she can only see but not hear. Ratepe watching his home city tear itself apart. Urza revealing that he’s been ten steps ahead the entire time. It all works because we’ve spent twenty-two chapters getting to know these people.