Xantcha Frees Ratepe From Slavery
Previous: Xantcha Arrives in Efuan Pincar
This chapter is about two people who don’t trust each other trying to survive together. It’s also about what freedom actually means when you’ve lost everything.
Breaking Chains
They duck into an abandoned courtyard. Xantcha needs to get the chain off Rat’s ankles. She grabs a chunk of granite and starts smashing. It doesn’t work. Rat tells her to stop making noise.
He has a better idea. Go back to the plaza, find the farmer she gave her horse to, and ask him to load Rat into his wagon. Or better yet, find a smith with a hammer and chisel.
Rat is practical in ways Xantcha isn’t. She’s three thousand years old but has almost no understanding of ordinary life. She gave away a horse because she didn’t need it. She didn’t haggle with the slaver. She doesn’t think about cover stories.
“You need a keeper, Xantcha,” Rat tells her. “You haven’t got the sense Avohir gives to ants and worms.”
He’s not wrong.
Assor
The farmer, Assor, doesn’t want anything to do with smuggling a slave out of Medran. But when Xantcha brings Rat over, something changes. Rat launches into a story. He’s Ratepe, eldest son of Mideah from Pincar City. Xantcha is his cousin Arnuwan. They were separated when the Shratta attacked their family’s traveling party.
Is it true? Some of it. Probably. Rat has a gift for storytelling that makes everything sound real. He creates a character called Arnuwan on the spot and drops it into the conversation so naturally that the farmer relaxes.
They hide Rat under straw and baskets in the wagon bed. As they approach the Red-Stripe guards at the gate, Rat starts talking to Assor about plowing techniques. Sunwise spirals versus straight furrows. It’s so boring and so normal that the guards wave them through without a second look.
The farmer realizes what Rat did: “He’d escaped from a besieged city by talking about the weather.”
Rat’s Story
Once they’re clear of town, Assor asks for the truth. Rat tells a different story this time.
His father was a lector of philosophy at Tabarna’s school in Pincar City. When the Shratta rose up and burned the libraries, the family fled. They went to Avular, then Gam, a small farming village where they thought they were safe.
Ten years passed. Then the Shratta came to Gam.
“All Gam was dead: butchered, the men with their throats slit, the women strangled with their skirts, the children with their skulls smashed against the walls.”
Rat found his parents, his brother, his sister. He ran to the next village. Dead too. He wanted to die, or join the Red-Stripes. The slavers found him the second night.
The way Rat tells it is almost clinical. Flat voice. No emotion. And that flatness makes it hit harder than screaming would. Lynn Abbey trusts the reader to feel the weight of the words without performing grief for us.
Freedom on Her Terms
They part ways with Assor. Xantcha and Rat walk along the road in the fading light. Then Xantcha stops.
“I saved your life, Ratepe, that’s no lie. All I’ve asked in return is that you help me with Urza.”
Rat isn’t having it. He lunges for her throat. He has the reach and the weight advantage. For one heartbeat, he has her on her back. Then Xantcha throws him off. She’s a Phyrexian newt. Built like a cat, Urza says, slippery and supple.
She snaps her fingers. “There. You’re free. As simple as that.”
But it’s not simple. Rat grabs the slave goad from her belt and activates its yellow web. He tells her to drop her purse and sword. She warns him. He rushes her. She stomps on his chain and punches him in the gut.
Then she does something none of them expected. She yawns out her sphere. The transparent bubble flows around them both. It stiffens and rises. Rat panics completely. The sphere lurches like an arrow. Xantcha has to punch him again to regain control.
They fly for a while with Rat pressed against the inner curve, fingers clawing silently at the surface. When they land near a stream, the sphere collapses against his face and he claws himself bloody before he calms down.
By the Fire
After washing up and eating, Rat finally asks the real question. “These Phyrexians, Tucktah and Garve?”
“No, not them. They were with the Red-Stripes. I smelled them.”
Rat swears at the stars. “I’d’ve been better off staying where I was.”
This is the first honest moment between them. Rat sitting by a campfire, wrapped in Xantcha’s cloak, eating apricot leather, hearing about ancient evil and immortal artificers. He knows The Antiquity Wars. He can process what she’s telling him. And he’s scared, but he’s still asking questions.
His last question is the most perceptive: “What do you think?” Not about Urza’s theories. About whether any of it would have mattered.
Xantcha tells him the Phyrexians are back and they’re in Efuan Pincar. Urza has the power to fight them but won’t until he settles his guilt with Mishra.
Rat looks at the stars and swears. Because now he knows he’s been bought by a three-thousand-year-old Phyrexian newt to play a dead man’s role for a broken god, and the only alternative is going back to chains.
It’s not much of a choice, but it’s the one he’s got.