No. Drift shook the muzziness from its head. I'm going now. Help me, please.Nobu took Drift to the arc of the lynk, and the others followed. Seeing this distort, so strange and yet human-looking, and feeling its telepathy magicking into him, Nobu was affectionately attracted. Everything Assia had told him about the machine-mind Rubeus and its domination of the world was focused here in this mutant's feeling and friendship for another human. Nobu's blood felt knighted, and he was eager to help, whatever the cost."If you must go," the eo said, "then everyone stay close. I've pinpointed you directly to the trance chamber where Sumner is. As soon as you get him, get back into the lynk. I've arranged for it at least to get you out of Oxact. From there, you'll have to use the two sehs you have—Assia's and Jac's—and fly north to the next lynk. That'll return you here."Assia took Nobu's hand. It was strange seeing him dressed in yellow eo raiment. "Nobu—you don't have to come. You don't even know Sumner.""I know you," he said with his usual courtliness. "Be-sides, Rubeus is the dark side of the Delph. I must do what I can now, as a man." The continent of time on which he had existed god-free, hungerless and enlightened, was still in sight. Only the clarity he had known then was gone. Fatigue was thicker than he remembered.Let's go, Drift urged. And they entered the lynk.[ Chandogya Upanishad refers to the inmost self as Inner Light.[Al-Ghazali taught that everything is a gradation of light.[Rumi wrote:Light shapes the embryo in the womb—Why else do we come out of the darkness with eyes?note 29They found Sumner alone, trussed up in the vortex illumination of the trance-sling. White metal arches gazelled in long curves down endless corridors, the blue light shatterable on the mirror-polished floors.Drift ran to Sumner and immediately began unstrapping him. Lotus Face— wake up!As the straps were undone, hexahedrons of sunfire hum-circled once around the chamber and vanished. Sumner was lowered to the ground and sat up, slow-faced. Drift embraced him, and with all its empathic presence it rooted him in the here and now. This is real. You are awake. Can you feel it?Sumner nodded, the bloodshot depths of his trance far-ther away now in the ne's telepathic grip than all his past lives. "Drift," he mumbled. "Thank you." He looked up at the others: Nobu, Jac, Assia. They gazed down on him like an illumination: faces in a field of force. Nobu's expression was a hypnotism of fascination, and Sumner remembered him from Corby's shadowshooting. "Where's Rubeus?""Not far, I'd guess," Assia said. "We should move."Hammer light banged vision, and the entire dream-chamber went bright-blind. When sight returned, Jac was gone."Jac!" Assia cried, her voice puling into odd, overlapping echoes."You think you have accomplished anything?" Voice boomed through the chamber. "How else could I have Jac returned but to let you enter my rath. And now that I have what is mine, you are all corpses."Assia pushed Nobu toward the lynk and helped Sumner to his feet. "That was a particle-beam Rubeus hit us with," she said. "Only the field built into the seh saved us. But the seh can't absorb too many of those. We have to get out now.""You are in the darkest pit of your lives," Voice spoke, as darkness shambled around them. "Where can you run? Dis-tance is thought—and I have the bigger mind."A chord of light from Assia's seh waved across the room, pointing the way to the lynk."What about Jac?" Sumner asked, tracking a movement through the darkness."I don't know what happened. I've never seen anything like that. Rubeus is stronger than any of us thought. We have—"Assia broke off as a crowd of simplefaced orts hardened out of the darkness. Sumner had sensed them closing in, and as they surrounded them, he spun into violence. His slashing hands hit tough artificial faces, knocking down three orts before Assia's seh-light bluebrightened to a cutting laser. She seared off the head of the ort that was grappling with Nobu and swung the hot beam around, driving the others back into the darkness.They ran through the lynk and into a predawn land-scape. Vast fists of laser-lit clouds were rising from beyond the white peak of Oxact. Closer, the ridgerocks were lighting up around them, shining like coral. "It's a war," Assia almost cried. "These rocks have been hit by metafrequency light. Ausbok must be striking back."Drift took Sumner's hand. It was sinewed and warm. Can we get away?"We have only one seh," Assia said, pinching back the cry in her blood. "The other one was with Jac."Sumner looked closely at Assia, trying to feel whether he was still tranced. His veins felt black and caulked, but the spirit he saw in her face bolstered him.Nobu edged closer to them. "The sky's on fire," he said, awed. His eyes were burning with a possessed light, and his face was a shining of terror as he followed the rapid blasts of energy hacking the sky. Deeper within the hostility of his fear, Nobu was watching, not participating. He felt disem-bodied, numbed by the horror around him.Sumner released Drift's hand and mounted a pebbled winze to see where they were. A childshapedmoon was sitting low on the sky where laser arcs crisscrossed, and the skirling breeze was a chimney of sounds: toads, insects, and the approaching siren of burning rock. … He glimpsed a mirror-eyed fox; then the pinecove clapped into an exploding radiance, and a long-tailed scream sirened louder than hearing.Sumner scrambled over to the others. Nobu was squat-ting, dazed and feverish. Assia had her seh out and was slowly and purposefully moving her fingers over the control lights. Drift cowered at her side. "There's a lynk three kilom-eters south of here. My seh won't lift all of us. We're going to have to run.""What was that?" Sumner asked, his voice quavering with the vibrations in his chest."An ort fired a particle beam at us," Assia said. "The seh—"Another burst of sear-white energy haloed over them, and a gale of deafness. "Hurry," she cried. "Rubeus has weapons that can smash a seh-field."Sumner put Drift over his shoulder, and they took Nobu by his arms and lifted him into a run. The pinecove was burning, and by that staggering light they thrashed their way through the ferns to where the land sloped down to a chasmal darkness. Opal smoke glowed on the horizon like the milky acid of a fever dream. Overhead, stars were falling.By the brightness of the firefight, Assia could see the thunder in Sumner's stare and the terror in Nobu's. They weren't going to make it. She was aware that it was time for all of them to die. Karma.The darkness was shaken out of the night, and she saw the whole forest ahead of them moving. Orts—millions of them—walled the woods. They moved as one—hordes of rats, wolves, and panthers, ice-eyed and eerily synchronized. If only a handful of them had energy disruptors, the seh field would collapse in moments. She balked, but Sumner ran on with Nobu. Didn't he see? She screamed after him, though hearing had been hewn away by the screaming sky. Darkness folded in as she dashed up to him and pointed ahead. Sumner gazed at her wildly, and she thought his mind was adrift in his blood. An ax of light split vision. When it jarred back, Sumner was pushing her forward, pointing with his face to their right. Then, in the iridescent shadow of the dying world, she saw.The deva—a rubylight tornado—was exploding through the forest. Radiant arc-fire blazed starhot, burning through the pockets of their sight. They glanced aside, and when they looked back, half the forest was gone. The deva was leaning to their left, herding away the army of orts.Assia led the way over the churned earth. The plain of blasted trees seemed to stretch ahead of them long as time. The tremendous incline of the sky was dark for a moment, deep and serene as the circle of the soul. Then sunfire ensphered everything, and with a furious windcry, the deva was no more.