Radix

Ardent Fang tramped over and studied the tracks. "Un-der two hours. Bonescrolls?"
It must be, Drift thought, and Ardent Fang felt its re-spect. I don't sense him at all, but why else would a swamp-puma come this deep into the wastes?
A puling cry wavered out of the distance—the lonely, ethereal caterwaul of a huge cat.
Now there are three of us.
"Come on, let's find a place before dark." Ardent Fang marched out through the sun-blown weeds toward a simmer-ing landscape of black buttes and salt domes.
For the past two days they had wandered the Road from one waterhole to the next, seeking the presence of Bonescrolls' enemy. By the end of the first day they had begun to wonder if the stranger was an enemy at all. Drift sensed the man, even though it was impossible to pinpoint him. His mind was that empty. He was close, and he stayed nearby, haunting the shadowed terrain. He watched them, but he didn't act like an enemy. He didn't urinate in the waterholes after he drank, and he had left no poison-burrs in the
sand that they had found yet.
What frightened Ardent Fang was that no spoor was visible: not a footprint or a urine scent. The man was super-natural. It baffled and unsteadied Ardent Fang, and because he couldn't feel the tenuous vibrations of the stranger's salt, not even through Drift, he had begun to doubt his existence. Perhaps it was one of the magnar's ploys to test their loyalty or their spiritual depth.
He glissaded down a slope of copper sand and mounted a windnotched incline of black rock. At the top he gazed beyond the undulant salt domes, across bronze fields of pebbled sand, toward the crater highlands. That would be a good place to test his theory, he figured, since the ash prairies around the craters trapped even dragonfly prints.
Ardent Fang strode boldly over the cinder wastes, cut-ting a straight line of tracks to an arena of brimstone out-crops. Sitting on the hard ground among the knobs of brimstone, Drift felt at ease. The night before, they had slept in the open, and until dawn Drift had lain in a half-stupor, feeling the thin psynergy of the stranger moving across the stone shapes around them. At least here, even though there was nothing to eat, there would be tracks in the morning.
Ardent Fang reached into his hip pouch and removed a devil harp—a dark finger of walnut wood that voors had given him as a young man in barter for food. The use-glossed wood was strung internally, its silver wires visible through the holes in its sides. Ardent Fang put one of those holes to his lips, and a lofty, sparkling corolla of sound warbled around them.
Drift snapped shut its eyes and experienced a pulse of warm human energy somewhere to the west. The stranger was still with them.
Long into the night Ardent Fang played his devil harp, sending his music bouncing across the highlands, sometimes forlorn with vibrant darkenings and rendings, and other times watery, bright as ice, retreating and returning like submerged sounds. Drift followed the echoing vibrations of man-psynergy circling the music, close and then far, until it nodded into sleep.
"Drift!"
A hard, thick hand squeezed the seer awake, and a hot whisper grazed its ear: "He's here!"
Drift sat up. Ardent Fang was hunched and still, his eyes sliding from side to side, one hand clutching the dog-crucifix strung about his neck. "I heard him clatter on the rocks," he breathed.
Maybe it was Bonescrolls.
"No, it wasn't a cat weight or— Look!"
Drift turned in the direction of Ardent Fang's gaze and saw two firefly eyes beside one of the outcrops. They vanished.
The seer stilled its mind, trying to feel the presence it had just confronted. Nothing: a dawn breeze scuttling over the rocks and the distant hiss of steaming grottoes. A de-tached, precarious feeling expanded in the ne, and it trem-bled to think that what it faced might indeed be an enemy.
"Paseq!" Ardent Fang shouted the sacred name into the misty darkness. "Paseq!"
Shut up! Drift clutched Ardent Fang's arm. He might think you're threatening him.
"Spirits can't stand the Divider's name," the tribesman explained, and then shouted again toward where he had seen those sparking eyes: "Paseq!"
It's not a spirit. Spirits don't have eyes!
"Paseq!"
The two stared hard after the echoes of Ardent Fang's cries. A long moment of silence tightened around them. And then, quiet as a shadow, a hulking man curled out from behind a brimstone spar, five paces to the side of where they were facing. Even crouched in the sketchy dawnlight, his deep-hulled chest and his muscle-cobbled back were majes-tic. Thin, flat viper eyes stared blankly from a purple-glazed face—an idol-visage, arched with animal cheekbones and a wide jaw. His gleaming flesh was a dark rainbow mask.
Ardent Fang staggered back a pace. He growled, but there was a whine in his eyes.
Drift knelt, arms akimbo in the ne gesture of submis-sion. Kneel, it sent to the tribesman.
"Foc!" Ardent Fang barked, his upper lip jittery. He bowed from the waist, quickly, and faced the apparition with his arms open at his sides but his head high.
Drift threw its mind forward. Shay, stranger. We're wanderers of the Serbota—an ecstasy warrior and his seer. Shay. It thought sun-showers. It thought blue-blossoming trees.
Dawnlight jerked in Sumner's eyes. He wanted to lash out, to bang into violence and bash himself loose from the numbness in his skull. But the voice in his mind, the same one he had been hearing distantly for two days now, was gentle. It was coming from the short black creature, the hairless thing with the needletip eyes and the slash-lips. It had no weapons, but the other one, the squat, hairy one with the lion-eyes and the
muzzle face, that one had a blade.
Ardent Fang read Sumner's gaze and removed the knife slowly, presenting it hilt first.
Sumner waved it away. Why had these twists of dis-torted flesh dogged him if not to kill? And as soon as he thought that, acid-pain blistered the pan of his skull, and he staggered.
Who are you? the powdery voice asked, and its gentle-ness soothed him.
Sumner straightened slowly as if rising from a great depth. "Kagan," he husked.
The seer poked itself, Drift, and pointed to its compan-ion, Ardent Fang. We 're Serbota wanderers from the river-ain forest to the south. We've come because your presence here has been felt. Can we help you?
Sumner was surprised that this beetle-shiny thing could reach into his head like a voor.
We're not voors, Drift sent and wished it hadn't when it saw Kagan stiffen. Just wanderers. I'm a seer —a . . . This close to Kagan, it could probe deep into his mind—already it knew that the man no longer intended to harm them, though he still seemed troubled. The word it sought popped into its head: . . . telepath. Would you like to see?
Sumner frowned, then scowled as the distort reached out with its spiderhands to touch him.
No harm. No deception.
Ardent Fang, seeing Kagan staring at him, took Drift's other hand. The psychic power that whirled through him brought a blissful, stupid grin to his wolf face.
Sumner eyed the two distorts closely. They seemed much less threatening than they had from a distance. It was hard to believe that these fear-parched creatures had created that crazy, crooking echo-music which had made him feel the need to confront them. And now? He edged forward and let the distort touch his forearm.
Radiance, clear and balmy, throbbed into him, fringing his whole body with light. Silver volts sparked the surface of his brain. He felt with a kinetic certainty that these were the good people, the joy people. His mind breezed open, empty at last of the demonic squabbling and the welding pain that had frozen his thoughts.
But Drift and Ardent Fang did not feel his sudden joy, for their minds were rocking to the shorn, beetling cries of the voor dead. The chill whistle of deep space was curving through their bones, shuddering their flesh.