Radix

Corby's lips winced, and sounds clumped in his tight throat. With tremendous effort he forced his breath into sounds: "Words-don't-carry-the-right-I-feel."
Bonescrolls' face was graven. It looked lichenous in the slender light. "The world is feeling. Each being lives in its own world. Your people have always respected that."
Corby's throat pulsed as his sagging mouth tightened to speak: "I-am-my-people."
"And Kagan is his people, as I am mine."
Corby's body twitched as his power returned, but still his strength did not quite fit his muscles. Bonescrolls was strong.
"We howlies have a riddle," the magnar went on. He chanted:
"The stars baked my bones The oceans culled my blood, And the forests shaped my lungs. Who am I?
"The answer is 'Human.' We're as much children of the cosmos as any voor. You have no authority to take this body."
Corby whispered, his lips barely moving: "Words-do-not-carry."
Bonescrolls' face darkened. "Then listen closely to what these words carry: I can drive you out of that body. I have the craft and the power. And I'll use them, unless you can convince me otherwise."
The voor's gaze was bald, and in the slow-rending star-light he looked like a corpse. "My-purpose-is-to-destroy-the-Delph."
Bonescrolls sat back and nodded once with satisfaction. "Thank you for telling me the truth, voor. I know this is the body of the eth—the Delph's doomself. And I have no objec-tion to an alliance between eth and voors to end the reign of a godmind. The Delph is my enemy, too. Once I tried to destroy him—but he was far too powerful. Kagan must be carefully prepared."
"The-Delph-kills-voors." Corby's blind stare sharpened. "He-destroyed-my-body."
"And now you'll destroy this body trying to get back at him." Bonescrolls shook his head. "The pain must stop somewhere."
The Delph is weak now, Corby sent. Soon he'll sleep for an aeon. But when he wakes he'll be many times stronger. I must stop him now, for both of our peoples.
Bonescrolls was silent, void of thoughts. Then: "It's all dreaming. Whether you try to kill him or not is not my decision. That's something Kagan must decide, for it's his life against the Delph's."
He was the father of my body.
"Still, it's his decision. You'll have to tell him."
Not now.
"No—he's too far from himself now. And besides, I have need of him." He looked out at the ritual moon and the haze of cosmic lights. "But after a year, you'll have to speak with him. Until then you must in no way interfere with his life. If you do, I'll drive you from his body."
Corby was silent. Even the thought of a year spent mindlessly floating in Iz stupefied him. Yet what choice did he have? There could be no struggle with this man. If he was going to survive—for the brood's sake—he would have to go deep into the body and keep a strong silence.
Already he had begun to fade into the roaring, radiant stream of Iz, buoyed by immense forces that in his human brain seemed terrible and incoherent: a grueling din of screams and goblin mutterings. A great depth was opening all around him. Flares of scorching white light gyrated to the pulsing cries.
Bonescrolls' eyeglints fixed him in the moment, and one last time before succumbing to the draw of whistling energy, he reached out: This is a universe of boundless space, howlie. Matter and energy are rare and small. For us in this vast emptiness, even dreams are real.
Bonescrolls felt the voor-psynergy dim and vanish. It happened so quickly that when Sumner's body began to breathe with the depth and slowness of sleep, the magnar was still leaning forward, watching Corby's purple kha waver in the night shadows. The voor was gone. Outside, the single bark of a desert fox echoed over the dunes, shrill as moon-light.
Ardent Fang was anxious to get Sumner to Miramol so that he could show off the burly desert-colored warrior they had found in the wastes. They journeyed west among ghosts of water: parched sinkwells and the long running curves of vanished riverbeds where the sun's heat glimmered like liq-uid. Drift chanted solemn and slow:
Weird how time is always sliding east.
Weird that we should move at all.
The seer was withdrawn into the Road. The power-channel it had chosen to follow sizzled beneath its feet and itched up its spine with information about other creatures that had crossed this way. Bonescrolls' deep, slow, and quiet psynergy was there. At noon the ne spotted puma pug marks in a sandbed and knew that Bonescrolls had gone on ahead of them. Bending over the spoor, Drift swayed dizzily. Dirge music whispered, flames spit, and a one-eyed man came forward with a curved blade in his hands.
Ardent Fang's muscular embrace brought Drift out of its glide. It rocked briefly in the tribesman's arms, its eyes seeing charred bone and blackened flesh, grease and ash in the mess of a dead fire.
"The seer's only half alive in this world," Ardent Fang explained to Sumner. "Half his life belongs to the deep dark."
When Drift was itself again, it made no comment about its experience. It felt out the Road and continued their trek.
In its heart, though, it was troubled. Bonescrolls had told it twice, as clearly as he could, that he was going to die. But that was too ponderous a thought to contemplate. Thinking about the one-eyed swordsman, Drift felt a wind sound blow through its head and the dirge piping begin again. Drift ignored Ardent Fang's questions and withdrew once more into the Road.
Sumner held himself in selfscan and did not try to un-derstand the two distorts who were leading him. The lusk had left him wary and shaken. For the first time since arriv-ing in Skylonda Aptos, he had time to reflect, and he didn't know where to begin. The Rangers . . . Bonescrolls . . . the distorts . . . He was happy to be whole again, but he was apprehensive about where he was going and how the magnar would use him. All that he knew with certainty was that he would have to serve to be free.
Everybody was twisted, bent, or muddled in some way: hunchbacked, gibbon-armed, muzzle-faced. But all of them, even the legless ones on wheeled platforms and the scabious ones with glossy raw faces, laughed with sincerity. They were all brightly attired in feather-rimmed leather caps, floral robes, and pants of bushbuck skins. The women wore ancient shell amulets, metal arm coils, and cobra-head bracelets. The na-ked children, crouched in the baobab trees along the boule-vard, were the color of wood.
Laugh, Kagan, or you'll insult the people, Drift warned.
Ardent Fang was howling with joy, his snout-lips pulled back in a grimace that could have been a snarl except for the happiness and tears in his eyes. Sumner grinned and chuckled.
Louder, or they'll think you're dissatisfied.
Sumner forced a few crude laughs, and then Drift reached up and grabbed the back of his neck. Hot, deep-felt jocularity percolated up from his bowels, and he guffawed and swagged with laughter. The crowd responded with hoots and whistles, and when Sumner shouted a gleeful monkey-call, they surged forward and swept the three wanderers off their feet.
Twice the crowd carried them around Miramol, through the warrior's-walk of overreaching boar-ribs, across the cen-tral square of icy mist-springs, up the hill to the curving flower-crowded lanes of the ne dwellings, and down again past the blue moss-banks of the river. Then the three were lowered before the turquoise-studded mudhole of the Moth-er's Barrow.
Old women in black robes with collapsed faces and alert laughing eyes greeted them. The Mothers circled Sumner, awed by his size and wholeness. They plucked at his arms and thighs, poked his ribs, pressed their fingertips against his stomach, measured the span of his shoulders with their hands, and laughed incessantly. The burn marks on his face and neck particularly impressed them, and they all had to touch his face once. Then one of them called out to the crowd in a gleeful voice, and the celebration began.