Radix

The rumors of a mage had excited the broods. Many were willing to jeopardize their lives to see for themselves what had become of the charmist. But for the eleven who were selected, the journey had been strange. They were haunted during their trek by long dreams of Unchala, the voors' spawnworld. Nights were an ecstatic experience hairy with the most beautiful music anyone had ever heard, and days were a powerful expectation of the nights to come. When they arrived at their destination, though there had been an omen—a deva had been spotted the night before— the telepathic joy of their desert crossing did not prepare them for what they found.
The landscape was malefic. Dead trees with shapes of pain cowered over a pond that had dried to a shattered pit. Where Jeanlu's house had been, there were only ash-timbers and the white shadow of a furious fire.
Three of the eleven had deep mind, and they drew closer together. Lul, the old one, had known this place before and was baffled by what had become of it. With her deep mind, she questioned the others. Clochan was as dumb-founded as she, but Tala thought she glimpsed blue kha traces around the flies. That startled Lul. A voor did this?
Tala couldn't answer. The traces were too faint even for her sharp senses.
Lul dismissed her suspicions and signed for the rite to begin. Clochan passed around the flagons of kiutl brew he had been carrying, and everyone drank deeply. The saffron fragrance puckered Lul's mouth and filled her sinuses with nostalgic vapors. How many times had she shared this feeling with Jeanlu?
Together the two women had known one-with—a telepathic melling of kha that had always filled their heads with a wondrous vision: a violet sky with three suns and the odd feeling of a body that wasn't human. The seers had said these experiences were the glimmers of lives that they had lived on other worlds. Most of the brood believed such talk, but who was strong enough to know?
The first cool tendrils of kiutl immanence pierced through her thoughts, and at the same instant Tala beat on the slade-drum the opening notes of a sad slow mountain song. Her body thinned out, and she was aware again of the electric clarity of the herb. Clearly now she saw the thin blue glaze around the fungi at her feet. And, with the intuitive insight of kiutl, she recalled Corby. Jeanlu's son was said to be a mage—a voor with the power to heal and transform.
She arched her back and stared up at the enormous sky. Beyond the world's lip the sun was a dark liquid red.
Lul threw back her hood and advanced through the rasping grass. She was old but moved quickly. The darktime was just beginning for her, and her face, cracked and ashen as an old wooden bowl, was still the face of a woman. Her eyes were all that had gone strange. They were tiny and silver, and the vision in
them was clouded.
Lul suppressed her thoughts and let the expansive calm of the kiutl hone her senses. Beyond the moan of the flies she could hear the subtle, queer ringing of salt-bonded kha. There was a familiar buoyancy to the high pitch, and she followed the tremulous sound to the caked rim of the pond. Jeanlu's body lay twisted in the tangled loops and lacings of decayed vegetation. The cry of her trapped kha whistled eerily through the crust of her corpse.
Lul gazed into the crushed carapace of Jeanlu's face. The gold eyes were gone, the voided sockets swarming with the tiny white threads of maggots. None of this disturbed Lul. Many years of tending voors in their blacktime had inured her to the grotesque. The only thing that shocked her was that the corpse still wore a necklace of stone light. That meant only one thing—Jeanlu had attempted lusk. Pirating another lifeform was strictly forbidden. With kiutl awareness Lul listened to the thin kha-plaint turning in the air. She recognized something of Jeanlu in it, a gentleness. But it was marred by a high-pitched fear shrill.
Lul believed she understood why Jeanlu had wanted to lusk. The charmist had been young, and her darktime had been terrible. Besides, howlies were animals—and dangerous, kha-green animals at that. Was it really wrong to take one of their shapes when the bloodpaths narrowed?
Lul brought out her stonelight from a pouch beneath her mantle. Shimmering like jelly, the brood jewel was ice in her hand. She glanced briefly into its depths to be certain that Jeanlu's lusk had failed. She had to be sure that it was not the nightmare-quivering kha of some howlie that was meshed in this corpse. When she saw Jeanlu's kha, blue as coal, she signaled the others to approach.
Tala led the way, chanting to the rhythm of her slade-drum: "Black the blood and the bones beneath the skin. Black the earth one finger under. Black the emptiness bent over time."
Lul's heart thrummed with sadness. If only there were more than slim dreams, vague brood-memories, and the old songs and rituals passed on by the seers. If only there were some way to know that the star-journeys and the other worlds of voor legend and dreams were real and that death was no mere collapse into nonentity. What was deep mind if it only revealed the uncertainty and despair of others?
Lusk! Clochan started when he saw the corpse.
Can you blame her? Lul responded. She was younger than you.
Did she cross? Tala wanted to know. Her blue-scabbed hands rubbed an unheard note off the drumskin to keep the flies away.
No. Lul motioned the other voors to continue the rite. It's her kha you hear whistling through the salt.
After fallen wood was gathered and stacked beside the pond, the voors removed the brood jewels around the corpse's neck and gave them to Lul. The stonelights were all that physically remained of Jeanlu's kha, and when they were gone her life would fall back into Iz.
The old voor placed the crystals deep inside the wood pile where the heat would be intense enough to melt them. The pyre was lit by Clochan and bursts of blue and green flames hissed through the drywood. The voors threw their stalk charms into the fire and turned away.
Lul lingered, watching the black smoke crawl into the sky until the thin, high note of Jeanlu's life shrieked out of hearing.
A psychic muscling at the back of her neck turned Lul toward the ash-skeleton of Jeanlu's house. Near the center of the charred pit, the lucidity of the kiutl revealed a presence among the cinereal ruins. Half buried in the fire-bleached debris was the shape of a small boy.
Stooping over the child-form, she saw that the shape was a sheath of tightly-reeved fibers—a cocoon. Its texture was black with leakage and seepings, but it seemed whole. Star-ing hard, she could see a violet kha flimmering over the blackened fibers.
Timidly, she reached out and touched the baked surface. She could feel the child's life, gently stirring, uncertain as the shifting patterns of clouds. She pulled away.
Tala and Clochan had felt her shock, and they hurried over. But they couldn't make anything of the child-shape. Was this Jeanlu's boy-child? Tala could see only that it was alive. They would have to cross with it.
With the stonelight icy in her grasp, Lul quieted her thoughts and let the kha of the others fill her. A sorcelled mist clouded her mind, and the sounds of the vehement flies and the bated breathing of those around her folded back. She let the brood-power well up out of her bloodpaths and course like static over her skin. Her trembling fingers reached out and touched the charred surface again.
A spasm of flamebright energy flashed through her, knock-ing her to the ground. Stupefied, she lay unmoving, hearing the awesome thundering of her heart.