Radix

"Waiting?" Sumner said. "For what?"
"For you." Corby motioned Sumner to follow him. "You were the only consort she conceived by. I've been calling for you since she died."
Sumner didn't move. His hands were jammed in his pockets, his fingers furiously clenched. The wind freshened, and he breathed deeply. If he didn't fear Corby so much, he would have hated him. Manipulating me like I was a machine — foc! He looked over his shoulder to find Nefandi, but the man was gone. A hysterical laugh coiled tightly inside him. First sign of a real voor and he tucks his tail.
"All of Jeanlu's brood jewels are yours," Corby said easily. "She has six or seven."
Wog! Sumner's heart thudded. He picked a pebble out of the mud and whipped it sidewise over the pool so that it skipped five times before sinking. A smile warmed his face, and he thought: You knew that's what I came for, didn 't you?
Corby nodded. "I put the thought there myself. I had to get you here somehow."
Sumner nodded back at him, both frightened and reas-sured. Six or seven brood jewels! What do you want me to do?
"That's between you and Jeanlu. First, you should see her."
Sumner toed a stubborn root in the mud. I thought you said she was dead.
"She is. But her body is waiting. You'll be the last to see her."
A spasm of uncertainty writhed in Sumner's belly. I don't understand.
"Of course not. You're a howlie." Corby's mute eyes could have been mocking or indifferent or anything.
The boy led him through the tamarind trees toward the trellis at the far end of the pool. Along the way, Sumner eyed the trees near the front of the cottage, their trunks and limbs swollen and mottled, an amber gum oozing over the glisten-ing bark.
"When Jeanlu was dying," Corby said, "I got very scared. I've never been without her. My fear twisted my kha and changed the land."
Sumner's insides were tight with anxiety, but he fol-lowed Corby silently. He wondered where Nefandi had gone and why. It was hard for him to imagine fear glazing the mind within that one-eyed, split face.
The trellis was one wall of a three-walled enclosure. The other two walls were also vine-lashed, stone matted with red moss. Corby stood beside a narrow entrance that was flanked by stone posts engraved with images of interlocking serpents.
Standing before him, Sumner could see that the enclosure was open to the sky. A wedge of swans moved across the distance, and he thought he heard the long cry of their wandering.
Corby, still naked but dry, skin puffy and white as a bleached log, eyes remote, swept his child's arm toward the entrance. Sumner pursed his lips, jaw muscles drawn. He was caught between his need for the promised brood jewels and his dread. Suddenly he was curious to know how Jeanlu had died, but, afraid to hear the answer, he stepped past Corby.
The enclosure was small, and as soon as he entered he was confronted by Jeanlu. She was seated in a cane chair facing the entrance. Her face and hands were crusted with the black oystershell scabs he had first seen years ago on her abdomen. Her features were crackled and shiny and shrunken to the bone, giving her a charred skullface. One eyelid was curdled shut in the middle of its socket. The other was angled open, revealing the lower half of a milky blue eyeball and the crescent of a gold iris.
Sumner stood fast. The grass around Jeanlu's chair was pale and wilting over a tarry black and blistered marl. A faint rank fragrance of the sea curled in the air, and for one crazed instant he believed that the corpse, though its eyes were hooded, was staring at him.
He pulled his eyes away from the face. Jeanlu was wear-ing reed sandals, white, sharply creased trousers, and a bulky vest of plaited herbs and flowers, dried and glazed. Around her neck and over the vest hung an elegant necklace: coiled platinum clasps and stays fitted with a huge brood jewel and studded with six smaller ones.
Sumner involuntarily stepped closer, eyes locked on the green jewel big as his fist. A loamy stillness filled the air around him, and his mind sheered free of words and fear. Cold liquid light, as if seen through mist, gathered at the orbit of his vision and began shaping itself. He couldn't look away. An image was forming out of the sidereal reaches within the vaulted radiance of the jewel, and it was lovely as homesickness, warmer than billowy sleep. It overwhelmed him with distant root scents, the purple of summer evenings before the monsoons, smoky starlight, the bell of a girl's voice dissolving with distance. . .
An icy hand gripped his elbow. Corby was beside him. "It's easy to fall into, isn't it?"
Sumner stood up with a start. He had been bent over the corpse, his nose a few inches from the jewel. He scurried back several paces and suppressed a shiver of revulsion. Jeanlu's face glinted like coal.
After backing out of the enclosure, he walked into the sunlight. The warmth penetrated him, and he began to real-ize how dazed he was. His ears were humming, and the pit of his stomach ached with an intense cold. Damn brood jewel. He coughed, trying to ease the icy constriction in his belly. His mind was zigzagging, and his bladder was charged. Some-thing of himself seemed to have been left behind with the corpse.
He stared up at the sky as he pissed into the dry grass. His urine smelled like smoke, and the relief of it draining out of him gradually cleared his head. When he buttoned up his pants, he was himself again.
Corby was waiting for him among the tamarind trees. Sumner followed the boy back along the mudbank to where a diminutive pair of pants and a shirt were flapping in the wind. Corby dressed quickly and then led Sumner to a tub filled with sudsy water. "Wash your clothes," the boy or-dered. "The sun's hot and the wind brisk. By the time you've washed up, they'll be dry. Then you may go back and get your jewels. It's wrong to touch them unclean."
He walked off toward the cottage, and Sumner did as he was told. He worked swiftly, for as soon as
Corby left, the flies whined around him and began biting.
Corby walked slowly to the cottage, gazing directly into the sunlight. Its bright heat was the strongest bond he had with his mage-self. His mother was deep in her darktime, and he had just sent his father toward a lusk. There was no way to justify this with his howlie brain. He worked hard to remem-ber that he was a voor and that he had seen many kingdoms of sunlight.
Nefandi, as much as Corby's blood-memory despised him, had purpose, and voors loathed to kill self-aware beings.
When Nefandi had arrived with Sumner he had been cau-tious enough not to try commanding things. Even after he had seen the raels, he didn't use his field-inducers. Cool-nerved, Corby said to himself. Reason enough to keep him alive.
Sumner's fate was different. His time was used up. Within moments, he would blur away as Jeanlu filled his body. Lusk was the voor name. Sumner would be annealed to Jeanlu's will, and his body would be her new shape. Together they would complete a broodwork: They would confront the Delph and force him to stop killing the advanced voors. Voor godminds would at last be allowed to survive, and the broods would unite and begin to use their psynergies collectively. Certainly, Corby wanted to believe, that justifies lusk.
The voor remembered the first time he had met his father—that day when he had taken him out to Rigalu Flats. He had used his kha to look deeply into him, and what he had seen then surprised and saddened him: Sumner's veve, the totem of his kha's experiences, was all bestial—all preda-tors. He had no human referents in his past, except what his blood could tell him of its ancestry. But it would take him a lifetime to learn how to listen to his blood.
Sumner never had a human body before. His kha-memories were all visceral, bound by links of instinct, hun-ger, and fear. Nothing of compassion or awe. Only pelagic memories of spawning grounds, fight and flight patterns crafted over aeons, and echoes of prey-scents unfurling from the dark loam. Yet— what had given the kha of animals the psynergy to be human? Sumner was more than anyone had yet surmised.