Radix

Sumner was feeling good. This old man was powerful. Something was going on between him and the short distort. When he stared at them, a ball of energy tightened in his belly and a shaggy, maniac joy trembled inside him. Too much power.
"My friends are fascinated by you," Bonescrolls said in perfect Massel. "You're the first undistorted human they've seen. Perhaps you'll explain to them what you're doing in so empty a place."
Sumner shrugged. He told them a little about the Rang-ers, his assignment in Laguna, and the voor mummy that had erupted in his face. He spoke about the mad sounds that sheared his nerves outside selfscan.
Ardent Fang nodded energetically. "It's terrible, magnar. When we crossed with him, the seer and I knew pain and terror greater than all the wounds of the jungle."
Bonescrolls nodded with understanding and smiled broadly. The polished bronze sunlight flared in his white hair. He brought four clay mugs out from behind him, each ringed with glazed, festive colors. "I propose a toast to your freedom, Kagan."
"Am I free?" Though he heard nothing but the world around him, Sumner sensed that the voor was still within.
"If you're not free, the magnar will free you," Ardent Fang said. Fang— Drift shook its head. The
strangeness had passed, and now there was a ponderous sense of redundancy. All this had happened before.
"It's okay, Drift," Bonescrolls said, lifting the fiber sack and removing a slender-throated jug. He filled a cup with a wine red and smoky as dusk. "Ardent Fang is right. You're not free yet, Kagan, but if you can trust me, I can help you."
"How?"
Bonescrolls' animal-calm eyes gleamed with laughter as he filled the other cups and handed them around. "A toast," he said through his grin. "To freedom."
"To the Powers," Ardent Fang added.
"To the living," Drift followed.
Sumner lifted his mug and glanced his lip with the wine. The liquid kiss cooled his flesh and charged his sinuses with a heady bouquet. After the others had drunk, he took a sip and followed the hot, sapid course of the wine to his belly. "Can you help me?" he asked Bonescrolls.
The old man nodded and noisily smacked his lips. "Rose-hip wine mixed with thornberry juice. A poignant combina-tion, don't you think?"
Ardent Fang agreed boisterously and refilled his cup.
"What do I have to do?" Sumner asked.
Bonescrolls placed his cup on the ground and stopped smiling. His wizard-flared eyebrows drew together. "If you truly want to be freed of this voor and if you can trust me, I'll help you."
"I want nothing more than to have my mind back. And I'd like to trust you."
Bonescrolls' long, thick-nosed face lit up, and his eyes crinkled happily again. "Fine. Then you'll be free."
"But what do I have to do?"
"Serve me without question for a solar year."
Sumner sat back, and his face hardened. "I can't do that. I'm a ranger. I've signed an oath of fealty."
Bonescrolls barked a laugh. He looked at Ardent Fang and Drift with a merry expression. "He's tighter than a coyote's asshole."
Drift covered its head with its hands, and Ardent Fang rolled to his back in a fit of explosive laughter.
"You want to be a ranger?" Bonescrolls shook his head with mock sadness. "Then you're going to be one crazy ranger."
"Crazeeeeee!" Ardent Fang whined, rolling to his side. He took Sumner's arm and looked up at him with moist, red eyes. "Kagan, don't be stupid. That voor inside you is going to break your mind. Why do you want to do that?"
Sumner didn't meet the tribesman's gaze. He was star-ing down at his hands. They were powerful, thick and sin-ewy, but helpless against the deep pain that twisted him. A clear head had never seemed so important. His contempla-tion felt muscular and direct, and he realized that if he were deprived of it again, if he had to prowl the wastes with no more wit than a lizard, not knowing where his sleep would take him, he would kill himself.
Sumner looked up at Bonescrolls. The magnar was smil-ing benignly. The old man nodded his head once, and Sum-ner reached up to the cobra insignia pinned to his lapel and tore it off.
Bonescrolls and Ardent Fang whooped and laughed, and the lupine tribesman slapped Sumner's back. "Don't worry, Kagan," Ardent Fang gusted. "The magnar is wise. He'll use you well."
Drift whistled and chirped, and a flare of small birds streamed across the chamber. You made the right decision, warrior.
"Ah, I'm glad you both agree," Bonescrolls said, refilling Ardent Fang's cup. "My servant will need allies. After you rest tonight, I want you to take him back to Miramol with you. He'll live and work there until you hear from me." He leaned forward and took the cobra insignia out of Sumner's hand. "You've had to hold too much, young brother—too much." His face was sad and heavy. "But you can relax now. I'm going to take it all from you." He popped the silver cobra in his mouth and swallowed it.
Ardent Fang lurched into laughter and kicked his legs in the air. "Crazeeeeee!"
Sumner closed his eyes. At least the pain was gone. Silence ranged deep into himself. The lusk was over. Then a burst of sound louder than Ardent Fang's laughter snapped his lids open, and he saw all the birds wheeling around the cavern in a clamor of feathers. All at once they winged out the window-oval behind Bonescrolls and vanished into a sky of stilled, pink-lit clouds. "My witnesses," the magnar chuck-led.
Skyfires flimmered over the dunes, and a toothed moon hung between two buttes. Corby opened his eyes and looked about. He was alone in a dark cavern. Above him the Goat Nebula stared down, fixed as an insect eye.
He wobbled to his feet, the squawking insistence of the voor dead narrowing to a thin whine. With one hand on the cool rock wall to guide him, he staggered several steps and stopped. A man-shadow was standing still as stone against the creased wall. The shadow stepped forward, and Corby pressed his fingers hard against the rock to keep from falling. The man had no kha.
The slim light from the skyfires limned a long, age-thickened face. It was Bonescrolls. Sumner's memories of him flitted through Corby's mind. But this Bonescrolls wasn't smiling.
"Sit down, voor."
Corby bristled at the command in the old man's voice. He forced all his energy into his muscles and swung forward to push the magnar out of his way. Bonescrolls, with lithe quickness, sidestepped, spun Corby about, and knocked his legs out from under him.
Sprawled against the cavern wall, the voor gathered his inner strength and drove the psynergy out from his body like a blow. Blue static fuzzed around Bonescrolls' head and throat and then cooled to a thick red in his chest and drained purple down his legs into the earth.
"You can't hurt me, voor. Be still."
Corby's effort had loosened his hold on the moment. Blaring howls vibrated his skull, and for a moment he felt as if he were going to blur out of his body.
"Your lusk is weak." Bonescrolls sat beside him on a jut of rock, his eyepits dark. "By what right are you in the body of this man?"
Everything was running loose. Who was this howlie?
Corby could see the old man's kha now. It was small as a seed and dense as rock—a green seed suspended within the cloud of the man's abdomen. Staring at it was like gazing through a long tunnel. At the far end, shapes were moving—dark, thick-haired hominids shaping clay with their hands. . . . Redoubled cries from the voor dead churned a vortex, scram-bling his thoughts.
"Answer me, voor!"
The power in the magnar's voice quelled the grievous uproar in his head. Corby steadied himself. His lips lolled loosely and trembled as his mind formed thoughts.
"Don't send," Bonescrolls ordered. "Talk to me like a howlie. Use the body you're stealing."