Radix

Hulks of shape reared against the sky's star-scratches, and beast-screams blinded hearing. Sumner's heart staggered, remembering his horror-vision of flying beasts: skre, the eo called them. He saw them by the glare-blue flash of Drift's rifle—scale-brocaded giants with fire-echo eyes and gaping maws, rushing out of the surrounding caves; their faces were a brattle of shale, grizzling suction-muzzles, wart-kinked around craggy eyepits, and in their hands a bruised blackness and the electrical wetness of tiny eyes. All of this in a moment. The hulks were hurtling toward him, and he cut down one with a blast to its grizzled head. Drift dropped two. But the hellshapes were looming out of the mountain too fast, their bodies nimbused with ghostly fire. No matter how fast they fired, they were being swarmed. Their heads were already banging with the skre cries—a death-energy not even their fields could stop.
Sumner and Drift lifted into the sky, and as the skre bounded after them, their nimble bulks leaping up into the night, Drift twisted its rifle into overcharge and dropped it among them. The white blast seared the night into day. The skre that had flown after them were caught in the heave of power and fell flameflapping into the seethe of maniacal brightness.
Banging in the thundershock, Sumner and Drift strained for altitude. Below them the mountainside was swaying with color waves, zeroing with refulgence. As they watched, the burning meadow lifted and flowed away like sloughed skin. Jerks of hot light spewed into the sky, splattering against the strength of their fields.
They rose higher, and the sky convulsed into lightning. All the cells in their bodies tightened with the burst of electrical power that seized them. Communication was lost. Drift angled for the mountain's summit, and Sumner falconed after it, the night long-jawed with an enormous hammering current. Twisted rays of energy cracked violently against their fields, stammering and storm-screaming, shuddering their entrails. Their muscles stiffened and locked, and breath-ing was impossible. Vision lurched into hearing, and they felt themselves going—going outward.
Silence burst around them. Sight drew itself back into their eyes, and they saw the mountain peak turning below them. We're inside the lynk's field! Drift cried jubilantly. Among the frost-rocks and the snowsheets, a skein of starglass parabolically faceted a crater bowl. Drift led the way through a curved port in the crystal panoply. As they entered, the pavilion lit up, and they saw the clarity of its emptiness. Blue-veined stonemetal molded a vacant, slightly scooped ellipsoid. At its center was a lynk arc, glowing blue-white from the inside like a cloud.
Drift snapped open its visor and then helped Sumner with his. You made it, the ne said.
"We made it together."
Drift shook its head no. You 're the eth. You got us here—now I'll do the rest. He walked up to the lynk, and its glow warbled.
"We're not done yet," Sumner said.
You are—if you can get back. Your gun is intact, though your field's weak. But Rubeus isn't expecting anyone to go down the mountain.
"Go down? What are you talking about? We have a mountain to destroy."
I do. It only takes one now that we 're inside Rubeus' defenses. You ve done your part. If you can get back to the lynk, you'll be safe. No reason for both of us to die.
Sumner took Drift by the shoulder. "You don't under-stand me, ne. I'm ready to die. I've been ready all my life. You go back if you want."
Drift stared into Sumner, and its eyes were gentle as the wind. Only my suit is geared to lynk with Oxact's interior. While we were being suited up and you were daydreaming about pattern and knowledge, I telepathically arranged to have the meson-bomb inbuilt into my ceinture. You can't follow me. I don't want us both to die. He pulled away from Sumner's grip and stood in the lynk's portal. Don't throw yourself away, Sumner. Life is always unrecognized until we're willing to lose it. Get back to the lynk.
"Drift—no!" Sumner's cry knocked against the lynk's field. "Don't go without me."
The ne waved in the open space of the glowing arc and disappeared. Sumner banged his fists against the lynk, but the color had gone out of the arc and he was left standing alone in the vacancy of the pavilion.
The first meditation was getting there. Assia lynked into the desert and used a seh to fly to where the Delph was expanding. She kept her mind free of the eo warnings. She knew what she had to do. As fast as the seh would loft her, she crossed the desert toward where the sky was a hysteria of glycerin colors, green and silver-orange backed by the black-ness of the world.
The second meditation was facing It. She glided into the tremulous blaze of freak spectra and descended among the long-toothed boulders. She passed a fear-masked ort sprawled motionless in the midnight. Fear spun in her, but she kept it low in her body, not letting it blind her. She dropped to her feet in the pulsing core of divined scintilla and was immedi-ately hoisted upward by a binding, lung-squeezing power. Pain opened into amethyst hellflowers, a magic of terror, void-bellowing, and dancing fire shaping demonically into Rubeus' laughter.
The third meditation was staying calm. She looked into the pockmarks of rust on the nearest boulder and focused— focused inward, contemplating how deep-space begins right here at the fringe of our deepest hurt, distanced only by the slant of our breathing and the current of our pain. The plasm of atomized colors whirled looser, and the underwebbing of squeezing pressure fell away. She was back on the ground, her legs bandy and her mind a darkening shadow. She breathed deeply, and the air smelled of fired clay. Outbounding radi-ance boomeranged in on her and slammed her flatback to the rocks. Breathing long, kneading the muscles loose in her belly, she stared up at the jasper spires reticulated in the phasing colors like bacteria, and she eased the fear out of herself. As she did so, Rubeus' crushing strength dimmed and she was left watching the moon breathe.
The fourth meditation was drawing power. She centered in her bones, feeling how the meat of her body hung, how absolute the pull of gravity was. In the stillness of the plumb night, she found her lifespark, a magisterial energy more named and nameless than the moon. Slowly she augmented the spark with the light of her mind: a clear, steady brilliance from which all color fell away. Centuries of still-sitting and in-looking in the tradition of her ancestors had given her the power. And in the mind, like attracts like. She glanced across time and saw, or mind-wrought, the lifetimes of her always-self, the endless shapes going back to nothing. Fear-drowsing vigor mounted, her body quaked to a vibrating stillness, and the rock spire became a shrine.
The fifth meditation was possession. She opened her body to Rubeus, and for one terrible, asphyxiating moment, her being was occluded. Showered fire whirled about her, and her muscles groaned with another life. Her breath chanted words that were not hers: "Ask the wanderer who souls the road darkness—" Rubeus was ticking in her brain, smaller than sound. Rubeus was ticking.
The sixth meditation was spirit. She looked deeper than her possession. She looked hard into the emptiness of her mind where reality and appearance flowed together, and a force perpetual as light amazed her. Then, as if no human had ever lived, she filled her body with the might of her being. The unearthly tinctures of the Delph's radiance were closing in, sphering to a blue heat. Stars cracked in the sudden blackness overhead. She stood, and her body was strong as a body of water, all the night shining in it.