Radix

"Magnar," Ardent Fang cut in, his eyes deferentially downcast.
The magnar rolled his eyes. "When will you finally give up these formalities and call me by my name? Bonescrolls. Please."
Ardent Fang nodded hesitantly. "Bonescrolls—we've rested and we're not hungry."
Bonescrolls narrowed his eyes. "This is not like the tribe of ecstasy. Your seriousness disturbs me, friends."
"The Mothers have told us that you're afraid," Ardent Fang blurted.
Bonescrolls' hoary eyebrows went up and came down slowly. "So." A ponderous weight sat him back, and he looked suddenly weary. "It's true." He studied the grain of his thumbnail. "Me—the timeless one, scared." A wan grin flickered at the corners of his mouth. "You'd think by now I'd have come to terms with this."
"What is it?"
Bonescrolls stared at Ardent Fang benevolently, and a sad smile creased his weary face. "Death, of course."
"You're dying?"
"No, no. My body, for all it's gone through, is as stub-bornly healthy as ever. Happiness does that, you know."
"But you're afraid?"
"Yes—I'm afraid." He turned about and gestured out the rock opening at the desert landscape. "Someone is out there. I've felt him for days now. I know it's a man, but that's all I know. I can't get close to him."
Drift, more than Ardent Fang, was stunned by this admission, for Drift understood the power of the magnar. Like the seer, the magnar was telepathic and could perceive all the forces of the world. But, greater than any seer, the magnar could walk out of his body and wander the lines of power, invisible and yet strong. The magnar could go any-where and enter into and become anything.
"Not even as ravens and snakes could you find this man?" Ardent Fang asked, incredulous.
Bonescrolls shook his huge head. "Not even as ravens and snakes. The man is invisible, though I know he has a body. I've seen his footprints. He's a big man, but still I can't find him. That's why I believe the Delph has sent him."
Ardent Fang and Drift glanced at each other.
"The Delph?" Bonescrolls read their bewilderment. "An ancient enemy—very powerful in his domain to the north. Actually, I'd thought the Delph had forgotten about me. It's been over a millennium since I raged against him."
Ardent Fang drew his obsidian knife and slammed it into the packed earth between them. "We'll defend you," he swore with conviction.
Staring at the knife, Bonescrolls' eyes widened, and he unwound into laughter.
Ardent Fang rose to his knees, both hamfists clenched. "I'm serious, magnar."
"Of course you are," Bonescrolls gasped, between lurches of laughter. "But I don't think you understand what you're up against. The Delph is called godmind. And for good reasons. I won't have you sacrifice your lives."
"It's not a sacrifice," Ardent Fang insisted. "It's devotion."
"Your tongue has more vision than your brain," Bonescrolls said with an imperfect smile.
Tell us about the godmind, Drift asked.
Bonescrolls paused, suddenly rooted by a vision he had experienced over a century ago. He had foreseen this very moment. Everything was as he had precalled: two distorts hunkering close, asking him about the Delph, the ambient light chandeliered in their eyes, the air heavy with sunstruck dust motes. The
magnar let the vision open through him, feeling eudaemonically outside of himself, above the real.
Everything is empty, a deep thought thought itself, ex-cept the absence of self.
"Perhaps tribesfolk shouldn't be speaking of the gods," Ardent Fang said, misreading the softness in Bonescrolls' expression.
Bonescrolls scowled. "The Delph is not a god. He's a mind—a human mind amplified by an awesome technology. Twelve centuries ago he was just a man. And I—I was a yawp, a simian worker biodesigned to serve humans. But I was different from most yawps." A fateful light brightened in his face. "I had been biotectured by my human creators to reason. Dangerous endowment for a service-ape. When I saw what the humans were doing—trying to create a superhu-man, one of their own kind strong enough to subjugate reality—I rebelled. My only mistake was that I didn't suc-ceed. And since then, I've been living from body to body, hiding from a vengeful godmind."
"More than one body?" Ardent Fang's voice was burred with awe.
"This is my seventh physical form," Bonescrolls said. He was grinning, but his voice was shadowed. "In the thousand years since my futile rebellion, the yawps themselves have become a godmind culture with the technical power to craft bodies—even minds. Without their help, I would never have eluded the Delph this long."
Perhaps the yawps can help you now, Drift suggested.
"No—" Bonescrolls tugged pensively at his goatbeard. "The yawps will have nothing to do with their former master. The Delph is the one who freed them from their servitude to humans."
"Then let us help you," Ardent Fang insisted. "We can find this man in the desert. Drift is a strong seer. It can track anything living. And I was trained as a warrior before the Mothers made me a breeder. I know how to kill."
Bonescrolls looked annoyed and dismissed the issue with a wave. "No, my friends. I'll meet this trial alone. We'll share a meal and some legends, and you'll return to your tribe."
"But how can the Serbota survive without you?" Ardent Fang growled. "You have guided us for centuries!"
"The ne are wise, and the yawps will help you. But let's not talk about this anymore."
"Magnar—"
"No more!" Bonescrolls' voice was a blow, his face tight as a fist. Then he sat back, his eyes crescents of laughter. "And call me Bonescrolls."
At dawn the next day Ardent Fang and Drift returned to the golden desert. But instead of following the lines of force back the way they had come, they wandered out toward the palatial mesaland, purple in the early light. The sand whis-pered beneath their feet, and in Drift's mind the sound became the disapproving sighs of the old man in the rock tower behind them.
Heat encircled them like a sphere of glass, curving vision and sound. Ardent Fang hummed with joy, awed by the beauty of the sandshapes and their soft sere tones. Drift chanted quietly about the sun following two warriors across an endless desert.
Sumner was trapped in selfscan. Far back in his mind, dim but always there, was the cooing, clicking, snapping noise of a prehistoric insect. Sometimes it tightened to a tiny wringing scream. Othertimes it merely breathed a deep, low hum from the core of his heart. But it was always there, and if he budged from selfscan—if he so much as congratulated or berated himself—a long icy needle pithed the root of his skull.
Silence. Animal awareness.
This was death's land—Skylonda Aptos—a million hec-tares of scabid desert.
Sumner couldn't think it, but he knew that he had come here to die. Not with a brain-splattering bullet between his eyes—the Rangers had taken away his guns. But even if they hadn't, he wouldn't have done it that way. He was still a ranger. He wore his cobra insignia and his buff regimentals, smudged and frayed now but whole. He would wear them until the land killed him.
Numb-edged from so many hours of walking, his whole body craved pause, and he sat with his back to a rock turret, mindless of the desert insects. He closed his eyes and focused on the sun's weight against his legs. He tried to relax without dozing off. He didn't want to sleep. Not yet. Not until dark.
The snarling voltage bristling at the base of his skull sizzled louder in his ears. It was a muffled voorchant, like the impossible language Jeanlu's corpse had chattered in his face so long ago.
Trapped in selfscan, he hadn't been able to think through his predicament. Still, he understood that a voor had invaded his body. Lusk was what the voors called it.
The whining folded into a staccato chant: black— black— black—