Radix

Johnny Yesterday was standing in one of the peacock-blue urns in the living room, eyes closed, a beatific smile on his seamed face. His reverie persisted, stupendous, immuta-ble, as Zelda, coming out of her shock, howled. She bounded up the stairs and intercepted Sumner before he got to his room.
He braced himself for a screeching rebuke but she only stared at him with narrowed, rage-misted eyes. After a te-dious moment her face softened. "Get some sleep," she said, with a calm more unnerving than a scream.
Sumner slumped into his room and collapsed on the mattress. The place was as jumbled as when he had left it—so long ago, it seemed—except for a clear space where the scansule had shattered. Within the muddle of the room, the solitary emptiness was disturbing. Like his car and his secret life as the Sugarat, it was another part of him that had been lost. How much longer could this go on, this slow falling apart, dying piece by piece? Why not end it all at once? he wondered. Whomp! Finished. He sighed, and his body sank deeper into the mattress. Why not?
Zelda was enraged. The loss of the car meant a lot of bureaucratic and financial trouble. She could have gouged out Sumner's eyes, but she had restrained herself for a rea-son. Yesterday, a few hours after Sumner had driven off, the police had arrived at the house. They were big and bulky and not at all pleasant. Two of them banged through the rooms, turning everything over, while a third cornered her in the foyer. They wanted Sumner. They wanted Sumner now. And unless she turned him over immediately, she could expect to be conducting her illicit spirit counseling in the dorga pits.
Zelda had been supernaturally calm with the police. She really had no idea where her boy was, and if she had known, she would have told them without hesitation—she was that furious at him for not warning her that there was trouble. If they had wanted to, the police could have broken her right there and dragged her off to be branded. Instead, they gave her a special number to call when Sumner returned to the house.
She fingered the slip of paper with the number on it. Her anger about the car was nothing like the fury she had experienced after the police left. Her career was gutted—no one would do business with her now that she had been raided. Word about the law traveled swiftly in wangol circles.
She had only one option. The house was in her name. There would be no trouble selling it, and with the money she could relocate in one of the big eastern cities where nobody knew her. Of course, the success of her plan had depended on Sumner's returning. If he hadn't come back, the police would have suspected she had tipped him off. Now her future was as close as a phone call.
She put on a heavy shawl embroidered with owls' eyes and black tassels. Stepping out into the cool night air, her tensions eased and she felt disappointed that she had gotten angry at her son. The car was not that
important. It would hamper the paperwork of her leaving the city, but perhaps the police would take care of that. The important thing was that Sumner was back and she was free to go her own way.
It was not until she came to the phonestall below the el tracks that she felt her first throb of hesitation. She dropped the only coin she had brought with her. It rolled past her foot and fell between the wooden planks of the street. On her way back to the house to get another coin, she reasoned with herself—
Don't I have a right to my own life? Why should I throw it away to protect an ingrate, a glut, a … criminal? "Klaus, you know I've tried. School, scansule, car—what more could I give him? My life? Do I have to throw away my life, too? No! I've done more than enough. Besides, the police . . . they wouldn't tell me what he'd done wrong. Perhaps it's not that serious."
"And if it is serious?" Klaus's voice asked. "Come on, Zelda—you remember the brood jewel and the voor herb you found in his car. That was over a year ago. Who knows what trouble he's gotten himself into? It's probably very serious.
"Well, then it is serious, Klaus. Why else would the police bang up the house like that? But so what? Sumner's a rapist, an assassin, a voor pimp—they're going to send him to the pits or the peeler. Let it be the peeler. So what, Klaus? So what? He ruined my life—he would have had me branded. His own mother a dorga! What did he care? He didn't warn me. Not a word!"
"But he came back, Zelda. He came back."
"He came back because he trashed the car. That's why, you rotting corpsemeat. He trashed the car. Where else could he go? Only I'd put up with his slobbering and his whining. You don't have anything to do with it. You're dead. Dead. Dead."
Several hours later, after dropping more coins, misplac-ing the number, twisting her ankle, and arguing viciously with Klaus, she called the police. They arrived quickly. She had just finished preparing a cup of wangol e-z brew to soothe her nerves when the door knocker thumped loudly. Through the window she saw a string of helmeted men file out of a black van and disperse to surround the house. They were carrying rifles.
"You're not going to hurt him," she whispered frantically to the men she let in. They shouldered brusquely into the foyer. "You shouldn't hurt him. He's a quiet boy."
"Where is he, lady?"
She looked up the stairs, and five men scrambled past her. Johnny Yesterday was asleep at the head of the stairs, and the first men to reach him dragged him swiftly out of the way. They stuffed him under the table with the brocaded legs and proceeded to kick in the doors to all the rooms.
Sumner was just sitting up, blinking groggily, when the door to his room crashed open. Three men were on him before he could move. He yowled and thrashed mightily, but one of them rammed a nightstick between his legs.
They secured his limbs with thick straps and plugged a rubber bit into his mouth. Bound to a wooden pole like a trussed pig, he was hauled out of the room and down the stairs.
On the way out, Zelda fluttered over him. He watched her through a blur of pain while she cried. "They won't hurt you, pudding. They promised." Then she was gone, and he was looking up into a night rippled with skyfire. The last thing he saw before they slid him into the van was Johnny Yesterday leaning out the upstairs window, his leering face bald and wild as the moon.
voors
The Fox provides for itself, but God provides for the Lion. —william blake
the mysteries
Black the blood and the bones …
Moving like shadows, dark mantled and hooded, eleven voors came out of the north, each with a stalk charm, each silent. They gathered on the chine of a hill and stared down through the simmering heat at their destination.
Below was the home of Jeanlu the charmist. Days be-fore, the deepest voors had sensed her death coming on. Because she was a rare one—a healer with the power to touch Iz—the brood had sent these eleven to perform the rite of stillness.
The rite was an homage, though the ones who had risked the journey into the broken land of the howlies were more curious than reverent. Only one actually knew Jeanlu—Lul, the eldest, herself a master of plants, had been her friend. Everyone else knew nothing more than the tales they had heard.
Early in childhood Jeanlu had seen her brood savaged by howlies, and the shrieks of blood and the hot pain had stayed with her. Over the years, as she perfected her stalk charms through her wanderings among the darktime voors, her an-guish opened into a vision: She saw how her charms could draw enough kha into her own body to birth a mage, a timeloose voor with the power to unite and protect the broods.
Many had warned and chided her, because a mage was a spawn of the Vast and few believed a woman could balance her own small bodylight with the immensity of Iz long enough to shape a child. Kha-warped homunculi had been created that way. Yet Jeanlu had been possessed by her vision, and she had journeyed south to find a howlie genetically strong enough to father a mage. No one had followed her, except those long into their darktime who needed the comfort of her stalk charms. The few that had returned during those first years spoke of a wild, lightning-eyed woman whose charms were potent enough to strengthen the bodylight and keep darktime voors alive. Some had even told of a child white as emptiness and just as deep.