Radix

The voice walked heavily through him. It was ominous, yet he wasn't sure why. Fearful premonitions grated his nerves, urging him to swing violently and see if he could roll free and break into a run. But a deeper awareness, just coming into focus, stayed that decision. The voice, of course. He recog-nized it.
Slowly, he raised his lids and looked up into the stern, ducal face of Rubeus.
Sumner tried to turn and rise, but he was strapbound, his body hauled up in a sling. The bindings clawed his flesh, and that sensation hardened his surroundings to a sharper definition. He saw a glitter of green resolve to a gem-caked panoply—a cruciform mandala. Around it, the ceiling was divided into lozenges of petal-blue light. The soap-colored straps, tense with his weight, were clipped to ball-divots that seemed to be hovering in midair.
"Murder is punishable by exile from Graal, Kagan." Rubeus voice was a scowl. "The distort is dead."
Sumner tried to twist his body free, and the ort-lord held up a clear rhomboidal gem. The light inside the crystal deliquesced to a ruminative glow. Sumner relaxed, his atten-tion fixed on the declensions of color in the gem. "Where's Drift?" he muttered.
"Drugged in Reynii. Don't concern yourself with that freak. You have more anguish ahead of you than its suffering. The distort you killed was no one—an easily found and condi-tioned animal. But you killed him." Rubeus said this darkly but within he felt awe. The distort wasn't supposed to die. He was a psi-master. Sumner's emotionally bruised mind should have been mud in his hands. He palmed the odyl gem and looked again to see that the killer's limbs were secured tightly. "That was a stupid thing you did. Stricture here deals harshly with murderers."
Sumner's eyes watched him coldly. "He tried to kill me."
"No. He tried to make you kill yourself." Rubeus' rooster-cut hair spiked against the glow of the ceiling lights. His smile was zaned. "There's no stricture against that. He visual-ized your death potently. Murder wasn't the right response to him. You could have killed a lot of people when you tripped your seh. That was mad." His eyes narrowed criti-cally. "You're insane. You see yourself as separate, and you pull those around you into the gap between you and the world." The crystal panoply lit up into crests and cartouches of patterning colors. "Now it's time for you to go down into that pit and face what you've dumped there."
While the ort talked, Sumner had been internally com-pressing himself, using techniques trained into him at Dhalpur. Muscles folded in on themselves and bone slid onto bone. With a snap, Sumner's right hand pulled free of its brace and whipped violently at Rubeus, missing his face by a centimeter.
The ort-lord jerked back with an alarmed shout, and the odyl gem spun between his fingers. The dreaming light clicked in Sumner's eyes, and he sagged.
"You've punched your way through life this far, Kagan, but no further." Rubeus' fingers quavered as he
secured Sumner's hand. This man was more dangerous than any scan indicated. "Graal stricture demands exile for murderers. But because I would kill you as soon as you left Graal, exile is disallowed. The godminds do not condone execution. The only alternative is the trance."
Rubeus looked upshoulder at the jeweled cruciform. "The trance will take only moments," he said as the ambient light dimmed, "though for you, it may be endless."
Heartlight pulsed above Sumner, and he twisted his head to face the ort. He mustered all the emotional control he had and said with the slam-force of calm certainty: "You can't stop me, ort. I'm the eth. I am the pit."
Rubeus quickly slumbered Sumner with the odyl gem. "I'm not afraid of you—eth!" He laughed, but the whole inside of his chest was frosted over. "There's no coming back from where you're going."
A tessitura of chimes ranged to the limits of hearing, and the chamber became a diamond of green-white light. Sleep-vertigo wheeled Sumner to the brink of awareness.
"The Delph, if he were here, would have had a bit of advice for you." Rubeus' voice spilled into the whirr of the crystals: "Don't rub one part of an elephant too long—and don't be surprised by a real dragon."
The darkness was tensed with light: Mirrorglints, sparks, and fibrous water reflections spiderwebbed the silence. An image was weaving itself out of that glimmerous blackness. Touched by nothing, deaf and distant, Sumner watched the figure of a man glitter into being. It was Ardent Fang.
The darkness lifted, and every shadow went with it. In the glare-white, Ardent Fang drummed with color: vibrant black hair and beard, coffee-glossed skin, eyes brisk with clarity in a square, unperplexed face. He was wearing the tattered Serbota garments he had died in.
As he came forward, the space around him, white with nothing, bruised. Shapes darkened in the whiteness: A sprawl-ing, flat-topped tree appeared in midair, roots scraggy and hanging. Nearby a splash of lucid water floated, flakes of sunlight skipping off it. Clawed shrubs and the skeleton of a pear tree unfolded beside him.
When Ardent Fang reached him, everything had been filled in. They were standing in green sunlight beneath bend-ing pear trees. In this grove, Ardent Fang had been blown apart by Nefandi while Sumner had watched. Now his face was as washed and clear as the sky. He held a stubby fist forward and opened it to reveal a brood jewel.
Sumner was awed by the supreme realism of the trance. There was no dreaminess at all. The sinewed trees, the glint of spiderlines, and the swagger of a birdcall were opaque with reality.
He looked down at the amulet, and Ardent Fang dropped it in the grass. The gem glowed hotly on a leaf of sunlight. Ardent Fang's sandal came down on it, and its crunch was knuckle-tight. "It's a lie." His eyes were yellow anger. "There's no strength in idols. No power in form—unless I'm there."
Sumner toed a tuft of lemongrass and noticed that he was dream-dressed as he had been at that time of his waking life. A slim moon limped high in the sky. "This is a trance, Ardent Fang." His voice sounded foolishly real.
"I'm not Ardent Fang." Ardent Fang's voice was blunt. "Don't you recognize me? I've been with you since the first day of the world. I've spoken to you in many voices."
Ardent Fang bloated, wobbled, and then unsprung into a hulking razorjaw lizard. Its long black muzzle shrieked once and the beast collapsed into its lunge, flash-molting into the blazing column of a deva-fire and then into the plasma stream-ers and oily flames of Iz-light. "I was all these beings in your life," a humming void-voice spoke. "I'm the Dreamshaper, so near to you I'm nothing. I live in everything dying. Untouch-able. Nameless. Free. I am." The coiling Iz-lights flashed to a center of instreaming white radiance.
Sumner cowered. When he looked up, Ardent Fang was standing beside him, and the pear trees were leaning into the windrubbed sunlight.
"Ardent Fang is the first," the shapeshifter said, helping him to his feet. "I know it's hard for you to face him. I tried to clean him up a little, so you could remember more slowly how much he suffered."
Sumner felt earsick, and he swayed as he stood. Seeing Ardent Fang, a frenzy of shared memories rioted in his mind: joywalking through the riverain forest, mating with distorts in the stables of Miramol, hunting upriver— His hands squeezed his head, trying to grab hold of his cascading thoughts.
"Where do you suppose the pain went when you stopped remembering it?" Ardent Fang was lying on the ground, his body reduced to a broken calcined skeleton. All the grief, shame, and confusion that there had been no time for Sum-ner to feel the day Ardent Fang had died returned. He dropped to his knees under the weight of it.
Ardent Fang had been strong as much in his will as in his body, and they had shared much. Should he