Radix

The others rallied instantly, flashing knives and turtle-razors. But Sumner was unstoppable. He shattered heads with sweeps of the oar, slammed faces into driftwood, and clubbed his way to stillness with the loose bodies of those that had fallen. When none were left, he couldn't stop the horrible dancing, the racking strength that forced him to smash again and again the bloodrags of those he had killed, until he felt he was going beyond his body, and he banged to his knees, exhausted with rage.
Far back in his thundering mind the mad chattering narrowed, and a whispered cadence began: Black the blood and the bones . . .
the emptying
A lionfaced man stood on the roof of the flower-crowned tower, his yellow eyes cold with fatigue. He was a distort, but he was not unattractive. Golden hair grew the tall length of his spine and glistened like fur on his arms and legs. His features glowed with a sapient geniality, and his movements as he crossed the circular rooftop were long and regal. He was a breeder, and he had just come from a full night among the females. Beneath the red soft-fabric wrap that he was wearing his thick muscles sang with weariness. He leaned on the blossom-strung balustrade and gazed out over his village.
It was his privilege as the most whole distort of his tribe to stand atop the breeding stables and survey Miramol. The village was beautiful with life, built as it was in a grove of baobab trees and mist springs. Eastward the jungle withered to a desert where the skyfires, the dreams of all living things, were still burning. Below, workers with green dawn-lanterns were scurrying among the round huts of Miramol, preparing the village for another day. And in the west, the direction all doors faced but those of the dead huts, the sun was untan-gling itself from the roots of the jungle.
The whorl is in all things, the breeder marveled.
A worshiper's call echoed into the sky. Several answer-ing cries sparked out of the stables from restless females, and the breeder turned and barked once into the musky darkness of the doorway to still their irreverence. He would be happy when the Mothers passed on his duties to a younger, more driven male. He had been a breeder for over a decade, and he was becoming too rapt and contemplative for the life in the stables. Still, finding someone as responsible as he among the sex-crazed young males would be difficult. No doubt he would have to serve for at least another cycle.
The heavy carnal odors clouding out of the stable flut-tered his stomach. He pulled aside his loincloth and urinated into the dark gardens below. The very thought of sex made his kneecaps turn watery. He was tired of rutting, tired of ministering to so many excitable females. He wanted nothing more than to be alone. But he knew that by day's end he would be feeling differently. The whorl is in all things, all right.
He secured his loincloth and walked unsteadily but with dignity down the ramps of the breeding tower to the street. Even among the dense shadows he was recognized by work-ers who stopped to acknowledge their respect of his position. The breeder chuckled back amiably, but he didn't stop. To-night had been a more difficult session than usual, and he simply wanted to go home and sleep.
"Ardent Fang."
The breeder turned, and his feline features expanded with reverence. Standing among the white tendrils of a bao-bab was an apparition of a large, thick-faced woman in a hooded black shift. It was Orpha, one of the Mothers, and as her image curdled into the dawn shadows, her voice lilted in the breeder's ears: Come to the Barrow, breeder. We have work for you.
Ardent Fang bowed to where the specter had been; then he jogged through the darkness of the back treelanes so that he might avoid other tribesfolk.
At the burrow of the Mothers, a rocky mound of earth surrounded by willows, he stopped and prostrated himself, waiting until a husky old woman in brownblack robes came out of the turquoise-studded mudhole.
This was Orpha, his spirit teacher and life counsel. She took his arm in her fleshy hand and walked him up gravel steps to the top of the rock mound. From there they could see through a break in the forest to where a warped sun wavered over the river. Orpha stood with her back to the dawn, the red light fringing orange in her short hair. With a roll of her wrist she snatched at the air and produced a milky brood jewel. She held it out to him, and the dim light glowed green around the white gem.
"Look closely, Ardent Fang," the old woman said. "The magnar himself gave us this crystal. You can see him here."
Even in silhouette Orpha's square face was strong and kindly. Ardent Fang drew assurance from it and then stared deeply into the brood jewel. Only twice in his life had he gazed into a voor rock. Both times he had been seized by trepidation so thick he couldn't think to understand what he saw. It was the same this time. As his vision dropped into the cloudy depths of the stone, the scruff of his neck tightened, and the hackles along his jaw fanned so broadly they scratched his ears.
Orpha placed a hand under his jaw and steadied his swaying head. "What do you see?"
Ardent Fang didn't know what he was seeing. It was as though he were perched on the windy rim of a vast canyon. Awesome depths unfolded around him. Forms made vague by distance were moving at the edge of his sight, and all that he could identify clearly was a thin hot strand of fear burning in his chest. He looked up with wincing eyes.
"You feel the fear, don't you?" Orpha's eyes were lumi-nous in the gray light.
Ardent Fang nodded vigorously. "I'm too nervous to see clearly."
Orpha guffawed and palmed the brood jewel. "It's not you, breeder. The fear you see is the magnar's."
Ardent Fang gawked. "The magnar—scared?"
"You saw it."
Ardent Fang shook his head, asked almost soundlessly, "Why?"
"If we knew, you wouldn't have to walk the Road, eh?" She put a hefty arm around his shoulders and guided him down the steps of the mound.
A Mother in tattered raiment was sitting cross-legged in the dust before the entrance to the burrow. Her face was live and ugly and her motions wildly animated as she arranged small jewels and bonechips in the sand. She studied the portents with her fingers, her nose almost touching the ground.
Orpha embraced Ardent Fang and whispered a blessing in his ear.
"I've been working hard on my last lesson," he whis-pered back. "I'm beginning to see how the whorl is in all things."
The old woman crouching in the dust sat up straight and turned the empty sockets of her eyes toward Ardent Fang. "The whorl!" She cackled and swayed to her feet. "The rains come and then go. The moon thins and then grows. The whorl, yes, the whorl!" She laughed loud and hysterically, and out of anxiety Ardent Fang laughed back.
"Jesda, be calm," Orpha embraced the blind Mother, gently sitting her back down in the sand. The large woman smiled apologetically at Ardent Fang. "Go, breeder. You have a long journey."
"Yes—go," Jesda repeated, her bone-thin arms raised above the scattered hair of her head. "Go with the whorl. Go round and round. Like the stars. Like the blood. Like every-thing. Go round. The magnar is scared, and it is the begin-ning of a dark time." She howled gleefully.
Ardent Fang chuckled and grinned amiably as he backed off. Crazy Mothers, he thought. Crazy in their bones. As soon as he turned from the burrow, the laughter fell from his face. The magnar, the one who lived at the end of the Road, was afraid. In all of Ardent Fang's life and in all the lives of his ancestors, the magnar had never been afraid.
He drifted down a boulevard of baobab trees flanked at broken intervals by immense tusks and long boar ribs. Sev-eral times he ignored the greetings of passing tribesfolk, and each time, alerted by their insulted hissing, he had to stop and explain his preoccupation. Word that the magnar was afraid unsettled the tribesfolk, and they scurried off with their hands on their knees.