Radix

Looking closely, she was choked by rage and terror: Lopped limbs in smoking sleeves were splayed among the garbage, blue-gray entrails glistened on the white sand, and the moon-white face of Clochan stared back from a blood pool with the startled somnolence of the dead.
"Dai Bodatta!" a voor screamed and leaped toward where the cocoon had been hurled by the blasts. He took another step, and his head snapped back, one eye a mangled rose. Two other voors were scrambling over the smoldering debris trying to recover the stonelights that had been scattered across the beach. One went down with a plume of blood at the back of her head, and the other dropped as if he had stumbled. The kha of both of them smoked away from their bodies before they hit the ground.
Tala turtled across the sand, scurrying toward the co-coon, which had been thrown against a rust-gutted oil drum. She threw her body alongside it, tore back the camlet sheath and saw that it was intact.
The three voors who had gone back to the third rig were sprinting toward her, and she howled at them with her deep mind to get down. One of them lurched backwards and flopped to the sand, blood spurting from her neck. A second one reached out to help, suddenly straightened, twisted vio-lently, and collapsed. The third bellycrawled toward a drift-wood log, thrashed in the sand for an instant, and then stopped moving.
Terror swamped her, and she felt herself wrinkling weaker. What was happening? Her fear-charged mind sensed no one anywhere nearby. They were alone. But what was killing them?
Lose the way—
She craned her neck and saw that everyone was dead. Their kha lights had wisped away so quickly! A severed hand laced with blood lay ahead of her in the filth-strewn sand. She looked away and saw a huge man in rags stepping out of the mangrove shadows. His kha was very close to his body, solar gold and radiant, and his face was flat and cruel with scars. He loped toward her with a silver rifle in his hands, and her heart wobbled. He was silent as smoke, a revenant.
Lose the way—
Dai Bodatta's presence was all that kept her from going mad. She touched its cold surface, and the psynergy that sparkled through her dissolved her terror. The light around her brightened, became glassy. A diaphanous white brilliance was suffusing everything, and she realized that she could cross into Iz. But who would protect Dai Bodatta? Who would save—
Lose the way!
Implacable radiance burst through her thoughts, and her mind spasmed: She was gazing at a lava-flow of forge-red light webbing to a furious white energy—a delirious sun, all starfire and refulgence.
The trembling walls and buckled screams of the voor dead dazed and pummeled her until a voice like a stammer-ing flame shadowed through her: Three hundred years from now, someone will find our stonelights and know that we lived.
Clochan's voice, thinning into distance like a bell. . . Joy and then anger sheared through her numbness. Immediately, the wind of tormented voices smeared and vanished, and she was alone again in the starwhite energy.
Lose the way—forget the body's loneliness, the mage's voice spoke within her. And she understood that it was time to stop understanding. The arduous journey along the bloodpaths was finished. A powerful, sultry wind was leafing through her awareness, scattering her memories beyond her reach. The broad, warm current buoyed her across spans of crystalbright gas, weaning her away from pain and distance and thought.
Sumner pumped a bullet into the voor that was crouched behind a rusted oil drum. Dai Bodatta? he wondered, stoop-ing over the drum and pulling back the voor's cowl.
His teeth meshed tightly as he stared at the grotesque creature he had killed: a slobbery thing, its flesh a glossy blue-white, veined like moldy cheese, its mouth a bubbling mess. He heaved it over with his foot and peered at the bundle the thing had been protecting.
A bewildered frown darkened his face. With the muzzle of his rifle he pulled back the camlet covering and eyed the childshape. A statue? No. He poked the black woven surface and realized that it was a mummified child—a voor abomi-nation.
Casually, he placed the rifle barrel between the mum-my's eyes and pulled the trigger.
The cocoon splattered apart, and a burst of hot ichor spurted into his face, kicking him to the ground. He thrashed in the sand, both hands to his face, a terrible pain stabbing his flesh. A stink his blood remembered from years before invaded his throat and sinuses and bleared his eyes. The lusk psiberant! Liquid fire seared his face and the hollows of his head, ripping maniacal howls from his lungs.
Spastically he churned in the sand, trying to get to his feet, but his muscles were quaking with the poison that was burning through his body. Helpless, beyond thought, Sum-ner blanked his mind and let the agony consume him. His body strained and heaved, twisting him deeper into the sand with ogreish convulsions. He writhed for hours, gulfed in pain, before the spasms slackened and he realized that he wasn't going to die.
His face was swollen and fluffy with peeling skin by the time his limbs had calmed enough for him to stand. The air was fractured. The light looked chalky, and the cocoon that had exploded in his face was gone, shriveled to a slick, colorless smudge beside the elegant cloth that had sheathed it.
Invisible forces were shuddering space, warping it like an old, bottom-heavy pane of glass. Distances seemed to falter, to curl around themselves, and time was staggered. The long swells of the ebbing tide were swimming to shore slow as elegant swans.
Most terrible of all, a voice was chattering in his head. He rubbed his temples and rocked himself, trying to shake the noise loose, but the dim, unintelligible chanting per-sisted. It was the same horrible mumbling, cooing, clicking rhythm that Jeanlu's corpse had tormented him with years before. It ricocheted across the back of his skull, dull and wrung out, just audible above the anguish ballooning through his lungs.
He lurched across the sand, wanting to run, but time was snared and space was bruised and distorted, volume folding like paper. Each of his steps swung him out across immense ranges of distance, yet the entire length of the delta hung before him thin as a reflection.
A dragonish twilight stalked the eastern sky, a windy dusk, the clouds low and running. A black-sailed
catboat rolling heavily in the dark chop swung hard to shore. Eight wild men with braided hair and eyes burned red by pulque and sun stood at the taffrail. They, like everyone in Laguna, had wondered at the explosions on the dump delta. At first they were too wary to approach, but after receiving smoke signals that two rangers were on their way, they decided to explore the dump first.
After weighing their boat with a coral-head anchor, all eight of them waded ashore. The twisted corpses alarmed them, but the sight of the brood jewels scattered like constel-lations on the beach lured them closer. They scrambled to gather the hoard and were on their knees in the sand when they spotted the madman. He was half naked and tall as a pine, and his face was a mask of charred flesh. He came raging at them out of the mangrove darkness, screaming like a rabid ape. One of the men had a gun. He held it in both hands as he sighted and dropped the lune with the first shot.
Startled, the corsairs gathered the brood jewels in one sack and decided to divide them later by lot. All of them knew, however, that death would be casting dice with them, for there were an odd number ofjewels. Hoping to even out their booty, they plundered the corpses.
Intent on their scavenging, they didn't see Sumner, his bullet-creased shoulder clotted with blood and sand, rearing up from the garbage pit he had fallen into. With a battered oar in his hands he reeled out of the pit and dashed toward the man who had shot him. Before anyone could move, he swung out with the oar and caught the gunman full in the face, smashing him to a limp sprawl.