Radix

The broken wall of orts, a squirming darkness, began to reassemble. Globes of unearth colors swept with windy mo-tions among the creatures, uniting them into a sprawing thing. A squalid howl bleated against the knives of the sky.
Time opened then for Assia. She was alone, though running hard as she could ahead of Sumner. She was alone in a rapture of terror and heightened feeling. She was going to die. After so very long, time once more was fated. Why run, except that she was running, fast, toward the wildest edge of the universe. Her face was heavy marble—emotionless, though a foundry of feeling was banging inside her, shaping the irony of her last world, breaking the chains to her old life. Life? The word was no longer sacred. A millennium of wor-shiping life in meditation gardens and thoughtpools amounted to no more than a tumbling leaf. The deva was dead—killed by Rubeus. Whole cities were destroyed. Up ahead, the plain loped to a far horizon where killing-light wailed its odd music and whirled like the ecstatic angel in an afterlife. What is life? The spiral echo of a dream.
Sumner heard Assia's thoughts. The one-with tangled inside him like the bright threads of a dream. Drift shivered on his back, and Nobu was leaning heavily into him with the exhaustion of his run. He knew that if he dropped them all, he could make it to the lynk. He saw internally where it was: beyond the stab-light of the broken field and over a granite-hooded hill.
The sky lit up into a swirling sea of green ichor. Superlight, he felt Assia thinking. Rubeus is moving the war closer.
Fear went naked at his heart, and it wasn't possible to go on. The world was a tabernacle of fire, and all hearing was a yowl. He would have stopped there, dropping his burden to die tall beneath an open sky, if he hadn't turned his head and seen what was behind him. The orts were swarming over the field, their devilfaces strained with motion—teeth and eyes glass splinters flashing beneath the spinning night.
Sumner dashed on, lunging alongside Assia before dar-ing to twist a look back. The orts were one beast. They slid and curved closer in a deepwater glide that made his blood knock hard as iron in his head.
Assia spun about, the seh in both of her hands, ready to kick all of its power into the orts. Spikes of energy cut across the sky, and above the tide of slavering beasts, raels came into view. A thousand of them
circled in from the nearby hills, invisible in the darkness, lizard-frilled, tendriled and bulb-glistening in the sporadic blastlight.
The onslaught of orts staggered and broke up beneath the lash of poison-darts the raels flailed beneath them. A brute cry whined through the fury of the sky-echoes, and their distance from the orts widened.
The rock-mantled hill appeared ahead. Vapor-scabbed fire wrung the horizon to crazed colors beyond it. Rubeus was closing in. The ground flinched, and they had to stop running to stay on their feet. Then a bellowing corona blasted seeing and flung them to the ground.
The air sizzled. Even with their faces in the ripped earth, their vision was a dazed, flame-shaken halo. Colors winced apart, and with screaming slowness, sight returned.
They were sprawled at the foot of the hill. Dazzling flame-echoes crackled above them, lighting the blown-away forest with the brilliance of the sun. The raels had vanished. Several translucent corpses burned with crawling worm-fires in the field, then disappeared beneath the renewed advance of the orts.
Sumner rolled to his feet, Drift with him. Sumner helped Assia up, and they turned to Nobu. He was sitting against a slantrock, his face floating in the muddled luminence, enor-mously serene. Sumner stooped to lift him, but Nobu pushed him away. "Go," he mouthed, pointing up the hill and then at the assault of orts.
Assia was crouching, waiting for the last moment to drain all the power of her seh into one blast. She glanced across her shoulder and saw the starpoints in Nobu's eyes—and she knew. The man was One Mind.
Nobu looked away from them. The orts were very close, a gigantic heaving of rabid cries and spasming jaws. Individu-ally, they were wild, void-possessed, flying forward convul-sively. But as a pack, they were an ultimate beast, a seethe of destroying. With evil intelligence they balked the instant before Assia fired her seh. The roaring energy blew orts into a scattering of sparking bones and whipping entrails. But others tumbled forward, dying hard beneath the frantic attack of still others.
Assia clambered up the hill in a mad sprint. Sumner was beside her, scooping up Drift in one stride, not daring to look back.
Nobu sat facing into the wave of orts, timelessly smiling, free of the world and of himself. While he had been sitting, one with Sumner and Assia, terror had visioned in him. He had seen billions of people plummeting into a silence like thunder. Billions! All whoever lived. Horror had nullified his mind, so that when he had woken here, he was sunk into his deepest self. The looming situation had focused within him instantly: He was the situation, vision-bonded at the core of his being.
There was no future, and that reality gave him a super-natural strength. The power of the sky sharked in his bones. His flesh was crawling tighter with it, and as the power mounted, his awareness widened and shone. He heard Assia's thought vibrating back through time: What is life? And he knew, of course, because he had been awake and aware for twelve centuries, dancing in the pit of hunger, hungerless. But that knowledge was nothing—a tumbling leaf from the heaventree of his being. He was the tree: his roots in the emptiness, his peak the zero of space.
The ki of the earth flowed upward, lifting him to his feet with infinite strength and gentleness. The moment was burst-ing around him. Demons were falling out of the wind—beasts slashing with frenzied rage, eyes electric screams. But they couldn't touch him. The enormous force enveloping his body was impervious. Alone at the heart, he watched the orts scattering, even the largest ones backlashing from the sudden and intense glorylight that blazed through him.
* * *
Assia, Sumner, and Drift watched from the top of the hill. The twisting bolt of lightning blazing from around Nobu writhed into the skyfires so intensely they had to squint. Scorpion bursts of white fire whipped the orts that were trying to outflank him.
Assia pulled Sumner and Drift away. The lynk was at the bottom of the slope beneath an apple tree ferned over with tiny blossoms of ivray and darnel. At first, the lynk didn't respond. The jumplines were closed, and Assia had to open the lynk's panel and fingerpunch a signal to Ausbok. They were still waiting for the jump to open when the hill exploded.
The lynk's field blocked the shock of the blast, and they watched with dumb wonder as a vortex of earth and rock dissolved into light. The lynk activated as the landscape cleared, and the last thing they saw before stepping through was the stone-vapored crater where Nobu had been.
Sumner, Drift, and Assia stepped into a transparent goldglass maze. Crystalight corridors and luminous mirrorlines radiated on all sides. They were suspended beneath a goliath arena of glinting hexagons, most of them kinetic with the movements of people. Sumner gazed around perplexedly at the askew and upside-down figures in the surrounding cubicles.
"Open gravity," Assia said to him.
"Yes," an eo greeted them. "We're in a freefall corridor below Ausbok." The eo was wearing purple raiment, and his mask-face was tight with dark feeling.
"Nobu—" Sumner began.
"It was an excellent death," the eo finished for him. "Rubeus' particle beam hit him directly. He's pure light now." He reached into the purple billow of his sleeve and removed a long silver seh. A wall went screen-blank and depthed to a view of the burning underside of night. The blast-pit where Nobu had held off the orts jangled with the lunatic colors of prisming superlight.