Radix

Deadly. . . The thought wavered in him with the fore-knowing of his own death. He was going to die soon. The nightmare visions were getting stronger. For two centuries he had carried when and how in the meat of his heart. A one-eyed man with a scarred face and a silver-gold sword was going to kill him at the end of the next solar year. He had lived the killing in dreams: the raised sword, the dark enraged face, and then a splatter of hurting bright light opening into a darkness forever in silence.
The magnar stopped in the mouth of the cave where the loud sunlight sang back into shadow. He could see far across the broken body of Skylonda Aptos to where the cordillera of the world's edge burst into the sky. Six hundred million years of geography stared back at him from the striated rock pinna-cles. At his feet the wind had cut sharply into the schist, revealing the spiral patterns of marine fossils. He knelt down and touched the color-margin where 165 million years ago the life of an ocean had ended. He picked up a stone and etched his own spiral over the exposed sediment.
Across the deadland, distant cliffs the color of sulfur watched mindlessly. A sentimental thought began close to him and then moved on, continuing somewhere deeper: This world is the rim of an abyss . . .
Deep in the sky a hawk drifted through a slow whirlpool pattern, and Bonescrolls watched it without seeing. He was thinking about Kagan—the eth.
The lusk was muddling Kagan's clarity and straining his bodylight. If there was any hope of the voor using this eth against the Delph, Kagan's body would have to be rested and his mind calmed. That was why Bonescrolls had known the Delph. That was why he had survived twelve centuries in this haunted world. That was why.
The old man sat back against the warm stone and closed his eyes. To be here for the eth. To serve. The puma's lifestrength flexed in him, and the intuitive certainty of his mission pulsed with his breathing.
He would help the eth, he decided with quiet convic-tion. Though it meant that he was surrendering to his deathvision, that a year from now he would be gnawbones, the rightness of his decision shone in him like sunlight.
With a lucid peace, Sumner accompanied the distorts to Bonescrolls' cliffdwelling. Along the way Drift chanted about four warriors lost in the world, each step foreordained as stars, leaving nothing behind them that was real. And though the words were melancholy, the tempo was lively and matched the strong cadence of their walk.
Ardent Fang hung close to Kagan, impressed by his gliding gait and the wholeness of his body. As they left the crater highlands he looked about for the tracks Sumner had made during his approach. There were none. And when he asked him about that, Kagan explained how he had walked the hot, crumbling rim of an exploded cinder cone to reach the outcrops without disturbing the ash. Listening to him, Ardent Fang was enthralled by the timbre of his voice and the expressions of his face. The man was simple and direct— without the elaborate face gestures and maskings common among the distorts.
That they could communicate at all amazed Sumner, for they spoke different languages. Magically they understood each other, just as, magically, his voor-bondage had ended. Somehow it was related to the black and silver puma sliding from the shade of one scarp to the next. He called to it with his thoughts, and it stopped and stared back at him several times, but there was no other response.
Sumner's mind was silent and motionless as the land around them. Only the joy of his freedom pulsed and turned in him. He knew from what the distorts said that he would understand nothing until he met the magnar, so he stayed with his selfscan.
Under a wine-dark afternoon sky they arrived at their destination. The swamp puma curled up on a shadowed ledge, and Drift guided them through the mazy corridors to Bonescrolls' abode.
The sunshafted dwelling was fluttering with birds, twitch-ing and jittering on the rock shelves and the ledges around the windholes. A carnival-beaked macaw clapped up toward a higher perch in the domed ceiling. Green parakeets spurted in one opening and out another.
Bonescrolls was seated on his straw mat before a wide window-oval, its sill streaked with birds'
droppings. He smiled, revealing big, square teeth, and waved them closer. He was wearing a red burnoose and hide trousers netted with wear. Between his bare feet was a tattered fiber sack. "Heroes of the Serbota, Sumner Kagan—shay!" He gestured for them to sit.
The three wanderers sat on the ground before him, and though the old man was smiling, there was a thin look in his eyes that urged them to keep their silence. Ardent Fang and Sumner thought that look was weariness, but Drift recog-nized it for the tedium that it was. How often in the dream-time had the magnar sat through this meeting?
Only a seer would know. Drift heard the old man's voice in its head. It faced the magnar and caught a sly wink. Suddenly the present was motionless, stony, filled with a desert odor of baked bricks. Drift felt itself sliding out of its body, and it relaxed. It knew what was happening.
In the thick heat, breathing was a labor; thirst was ada-mant. But it was so peaceful to lie here, to wait for the strength to return.
Drift felt itself floating within the awareness of the swamp puma, staring out from beneath heavy lids at a landscape of whirlpool heat where each rock was cut into jewel-points.
All at once Drift was inside the magnar. It was night, or it appeared to be, for though the sky was a vivid blue, the light was greening as before a storm or during an eclipse. The magnar knelt in a plain ofjagged stone, and it was as if Drift were kneeling, as if its knees were aching against fists of stone, as if its fingers were tracing spirals in the pale, chalky dust. The spiral doodles held its attention rigidly—
Drift was curling deep into the dreamtime. As usual there was fear, but curiosity was stronger. It calmed itself and let the vision unwind.
It was the magnar, kneeling among the stones, staring at distant cliffs the color of sulfur. It stood and began to walk toward a field of windsmoothed rocks white as bones, an ossuary it felt it would never cross. The sky was revolving with whirlpool energies: This world is the rim of an abyss, and I'm circling closer. If only I were an animal. Then I could face the emptiness with a surer instinct. . . .
A bird squawked, and Drift's alertness snapped back to itself. Rose wine was chuckling out of a slender-throated jug into a glazed cup. The wine ran over the cup and became fire that blazed blindingly hot. Drift squinted into the glare and saw Bonescrolls sprawled on his back, his face a deathmask, waxy and staring. Notes from a devil harp, soft and subtle, reflected off the walls, whined down to a dirge, wheeling softer and softer—
A guffaw burst the silence, and Drift's vision cleared.
Bonescrolls was laughing so hard he was soundless, his hands pressing his ribs. Ardent Fang, too, was yukking, and the sight of his savage face smeared with mirth and crawling with tears pierced Drift's confusion. He whistle-sighed with joy and relief and an awestruck humiliation. He had missed some joke during his vision, but it seemed not to matter. Energies were circling swiftly between it and the magnar.
"Bonescrolls is why the Serbota is a tribe of ecstasy," Ardent Fang was saying. "He taught our ancestors how to laugh."
Drift rocked its queer-shaped head from side to side, relieved to be out of the dreamtime but still sensing the greening of the light, the powers drawing in, tightening. It was eerie.
"Between here and the dust," Bonescrolls said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, "joy is all we have." He glanced at Drift, his horseface flushed with laughter. The seer experi-enced a rush of dizziness, heard the dirge music again, and clenched its mind. Bonescrolls winked and looked away.