Radix

Sumner saw the terror in Ardent Fang's eyes and felt the fear-rigor in Drift's touch, and he stepped back. The jewel-core peace enveloping him burst, and he was transfixed on a skull-rooted thorn. He gnashed his teeth until the pain dimmed.
You—hurt! Drift had plopped down and was sprawled against a lava boulder, stick fingers beneath its leather cap, rubbing its bald head. Ardent Fang squatted beside it, star-ing up at Sumner with cowering, pain-wet eyes. Both of them still heard the ether-wind and its stark cries darkening into the core of their brains. But now both of them could also see a flame-gold aura around Kagan. Drift understood that they had peaked into kha-awareness: They were seeing the thin luminosity of the body. But Ardent Fang believed that he was in the presence of a tortured deity—Seie the wandering god or, worse, the Dark One.
The tribesman prostrated himself, and Sumner thought that he was still in pain and bent over him.
How can such a powerful being hurt so much?
Sumner looked over at Drift and glanced his fingers across the eel-dark stain on his face. "Lusk."
Drift snap-blinked. Voor lusk?
Sumner nodded and sat Ardent Fang up.
He's not the Dark One, Fang. He's voor possessed.
Ardent Fang stared at Sumner's callus-bossed hands and muscle-piled shoulders. "Why then couldn't you track him or I find spoor?" he asked, looking into the lucid remoteness of Kagan's eyes, engaging the emptiness he saw there. They were the most empty eyes he had ever known. They re-minded him of jungle clearings and long swamp roads.
"I'm a ranger. I—" Sumner winced and rocked to his feet.
He can't talk, Fang. The lusk isn't complete. He's still fighting it.
"You mean, there are two in that body?" Ardent Fang's eyes softened, and he pushed himself up. He had never seen a body as whole as this one before. Beneath that strange burn, shaped very much like a black lotus with two livid petals at the sides of his neck, he was all face. The man was indeed powerful, and he had every marking of a warrior, but the emptiness in those eyes . . . Staring into them, he felt a tautness in his chest as if a storm were closing around them.
"Can we help?" Ardent Fang asked.
Sumner nodded, one hand milking the ache from the back of his neck. "Music," he rasped, and walked a
tight circle.
Ardent Fang took out his devil harp and chiseled a few notes out of the air, seeking a melody. But before he could open into a song, a growl rolled across the dawn.
Sumner spun into a defensive crouch, his knife appear-ing instantly in his hands. He searched the crater-mists' green illusions for movement.
Be calm, Kagan. Drift sat up, head swiveling. We have a companion around here somewhere. He's taken the form of a cat.
Sumner glanced at the seer with thinned eyes and moved toward a flat-topped boulder to get a better vantage. Another growl slurred from behind one of the outcroppings. Sumner turned and watched a silver-blue silking length of puma pad into the enclosure, its black underbelly swaying into sight with each step. Smoky ember eyes fixed on him, and as it advanced, he turned the edge of his blade toward it.
Easy, Kagan. This is Bonescrolls.
Sumner watched with fear and awe as the wave of knot-ting and sliding muscle glided forward. Red and black face markings forked over its sloped eyes like a caricature of horns, and a cloud of rainmist and leaf odors filled the air.
If you touch him, you'll see what I mean, Drift sent, going over to the puma and stroking its flat head.
Sumner tightened his knife-grip but didn't retreat as the rolling, silver-furred length of shoulders and spine came up to him. He stared down at the demon eyes, the black wire-bright whiskers, the leathery snout, and a wild laugh coiled in his chest. Two distorts and a puma!
A slash of voor noise shriveled his laughter. He reached out jerkily and touched the sleek fur.
Quaking, his whole body was seized in an orgasm of blazing luminance. A rapture of colors swirled across his sight and dissolved to a blowing of bright particles. His hand fell away, and he swayed on his heels, entranced in soulful ab-sorption, listening to the silver hum of blood far back in the valleys of his brain.
Light, the menstruum of manifestation—
Bonescrolls' hands moved dreamily above him, brown and rumpled, soaked with the heat of the desert sun. He was lying entranced in the shade of a stonesill, sunlight angling over his shadowed body like a veil.
Light, the void's notariqon — He was chanting these thoughts to keep himself alert within his trance. In a corner of his mind he was a swamp puma—itchy, panting, looking up at a long-shouldered man whose face was stained with an iridescent blueblackness. Light . . .
The air brightened with psychic energy, and the magnar stopped chanting and dropped his hands into his lap. The psynergy was radiating from the dark-faced stranger.
When the man placed his callused hand on the puma's head, Bonescrolls felt his life—hot and electric as blood—and saw everything about him, from his lovecursed childhood in McClure through the indignities that had cut him into a trained killer. But the spectral magnetism around him came from deeper.
Behind those downslanting eyes, the mindark opened rapidly into the luminous, terrible knowing of a voor soul. An icy-blond child, naked, with skin white as stone and colorless eyes, appeared for an instant and then dissolved into a windrush of sparks. Sight phased to a vista of galactic vapors and starchained darkness, a chasm so vivid that Bonescrolls was startled back into his own body.
His legs kicked out with a lurch of dreamfalling, and he sat up bluntly. He was alone again in his rocktower, a dawn breeze lolling through the windowholes, a sprawl of Serbota blankets tangled beneath him. He put his hands to his ears to feel that he was awake, and even though he heard his life knocking inside him, he felt dreampaced. That voor was powerful.
Far away, Bonescrolls felt the swamp puma circling rest-lessly, and he soultouched it with the spirit music that was always lofting at the back of his mind. The animal calmed instantly, and its complaisance steadied him, easing the strength back into his eyes.
This body was getting old, he acknowledged to himself, quaking awkwardly to his feet. He leaned momentarily against the curved sill of a rockwindow, watching the slow sea of the desert shimmer, feeling the depth-terror he had just known pulsing in his chest. Who was this Masseboth soldier that he could carry such a voor?
Kagan—Sumner Kagan, the man's name whispered in his mind, and with it came more understanding than he could hold in the tight cell of his brain: Kagan was the eth.
That thought alone was so huge, the magnar had to walk a long slow circle through the earth-packed studio to compre-hend what was happening.
The eth was the fear-shadow of the Delph. He was an acausal double, a synchronous mirrorself, the echo of the godmind returning from the future, as unconscious of his power as the Delph was aware. The
godmind had no influ-ence over the eth: If they were ever to meet, they would simply be two men facing each other—and that had always been too great a threat to the Delph. Until now, every eth-manifestation had been hunted down and destroyed by the Delph's minions. So how had this one survived?
The answer came in a tremolo of excitement. The voors! The Delph had routinely killed off the best voors for centu-ries in a vain attempt to exclude other godminds from the planet. The voors needed their godminds to remember their ancestral wanderings and where it was they were going. Naturally, they would use the Delph's shadowself against him.
Voor and eth—a deadly alliance, Bonescrolls marveled, passing through a slanted arch and leaning into a rock incline that led toward the passionate sunlight at the top of the butte.