Radix

The rest happens by itself, the Mother told him as she braided his hair in the hunter's style. For three days before you hunt you must abstain from sex. Then collect your psynergy at the base as I've taught you. That way, when the animals and plants come they will leave their spirit with you and slowly the psynergy will accumulate. Someday it will be strong enough to climb the length of your spine and enter your skull. Then your middle eye will open.
"What about women?" Sumner asked, trying to keep the petulance out of his voice. "Don't they have middle eyes?"
Women have other powers. This is only a man's way.
"So why is a woman teaching me?"
Women know the ways of everything. After all, didn't a woman make you?
Sumner kept the details of his skepticism to himself, though Drift often pressed him for information. He assured the seer that it was all nonsense and that he would break his vow of secrecy when his thrall to Bonescrolls was complete. Until then he felt bonded to comply with the strictures of his tutelage to the Mothers. He followed their orders and smoked his dugout in gopherwood when they returned it to him. He even spent an hour each dawn moving his sexual tension from his genitals to the root of his spine, though he half-believed this was a senseless exercise.
In the dark tunnels of the cloud forest he was mindless of the Mothers, ecstatic and free as any animal, bounded only by the limits of his instinct. The river mist strayed in whorls around him as he slowly made his way far beyond any of the other hunters. The waters were still very high, and food was difficult to come by. But deep in the flooded forest, where the man scent was absent, life abounded.
Sumner slid over the shallows, cautiously picking his way through the moss veils and fungal root-loops, looking for dry spits of land where tapir would feed or turtle nest. Nothing. The land was there with all the animals' life-needs, but the animals were elsewhere. As silent as he was, as patient and cunning as he could be, only small game pre-sented itself to him. Several times he returned to Miramol empty-handed, and the other hunters joked that he belonged with Ardent Fang in the stables.
Slipping out at dawn on the third day, he felt desperate, and as soon as he was sure that he had wound himself deep enough into the forest to be out of earshot of the other hunters, he used the sacred name for pig that the Mothers had taught him. Nothing. A white-faced monkey blinked at him, whooped, and somersaulted out of sight. He wished that he had brought Drift along with him. Even though seers were only used to hunt in time of famine, Sumner felt driven.
He backwatered and slipped through a rush brake and froze. Three peccaries were rooting the truffles out of a massive dead tree. They raised their bristles, backed into a circle, and began clicking their tusks. With his cricket whis-tle, Sumner alerted the other hunters. The catch that day was great.
It was his failures over the following days that convinced Sumner to try the sacred names again, though the sounds to him were meaningless. Each time he used them, though, he encountered exceptional lifeforms: a sabalo trout huge as a salmon, a grandfather manatee happy to die and heavy with useful blubber, and two giant wild turkeys.
The Mothers were startled by how thoroughly Sumner had taken to their knowledge. They resolved to show him no more, fearing that when his thrall to Bonescrolls was ended he would reveal everything to the profane. Already he had surpassed many of the Mothers themselves in his ability to send and receive psynergy.
Drift, too, could see that Sumner was amassing great strength. It watched his bodylight whirl faster and stronger in his abdomen and gather into a balled, furry gold light above his buttocks. But Sumner was unaware of this change. The waters were going down, and he couldn't tell whether it was the sacred names or just the return of the creatures to their habitats that was responsible for his bounty. When Bonescrolls called him to his desert abode, he asked the magnar.
"It's all you," Bonescrolls said in his perfect Massel. "You put on masks and pretend to be a pig or a turkey or a Serbota hunter. But it's all you."
Sumner frowned. "Why then does anyone starve?"
Bonescrolls grinned as though Sumner had seen his sleight of hand. "We play a rough game. What fun would it be if we didn't die sometimes? What would we do with the masks we were tired of?"
Sumner was still frowning when Bonescrolls clapped his hands. "Enough of this banter. I have only two more assign-ments for you. They're both very important, and I hope you'll do your best."
"As important as a nut and strawberry omelette?"
Bonescrolls gave him a reproving look. "Someday you'll understand the importance of a truly great omelette." With luminous eyes he stared down Sumner's scowl.
"What do I have to do?"
"Deliver this." The old man rolled his hand on his wrist like a magician and produced a green brood jewel. It caught the light deeply and held it, glowing from within like a flower. "Take Drift with you. It knows where to go. Tell it to take you to the yawps."
The jewel felt electrical in Sumner's grasp. It raised the hairs on the back of his hand, and when he gazed into it the soft light curved into fulgent tunnelings. Deep within, past the purring reflections, a white flake trembled, shivering to star brightness. The radiant spicules of light shifted and re-formed, and Sumner thought of spring clouds ballooning over green ponds. Then the gleaming threads knotted and tight-ened to an image—a child's face of white porcelain with dreamy, colorless eyes. Sumner would have dropped the stone if Bonescrolls hadn't steadied his hand.
"You're still in lusk, young brother." He took the brood jewel and wrapped it in black silk. "It's best that you stay away from all voorish things."
"I just saw—"
"I know what you saw."
Sumner palmed his eyes. "Why?"
Bonescrolls shrugged and handed him the wrapped jewel.
Sumner hefted it and tried to feel the energy through the cloth. "How does this thing work?"
"The voor in you knows. If you really want to under-stand, you'll find out."
"You won't tell me?"
Bonescrolls vigorously shook his head and flapped air through his lips like a horse. "You leave too many
tracks as it is. I don't want to make you heavier. Can't you see? I'm trying to empty you."
* * *
The journey back to Miramol was foggy with memories of Corby. He thought again of the one-eyed stranger who had stopped his car in Rigalu Flats and told him about the Delph— and he thought of Jeanlu and how, his whole life, he had been led by deception and error. It took all of his selfscanning discipline to overcome the clumsy nostalgia Corby's image had sent banging through his mind. Even so, when he got to Miramol, Drift could see that he was not himself.
The golden energy that had tufted like a tail at the bottom of his spine had diffused, and the slippery burn scar on his face seemed darker than ever. What's troubling you? Drift asked.
Sumner told it about Corby's visage and his heavy mem-ories.
The past is a disguise, it said, inflecting its telepathic voice as much as it could with fellow-feeling.
You're not really concerned about that. It's something going on now that worries you. Your year of thralldom is more than half up—
Sumner nodded. That was it, he knew. Having someone to direct his life was what he needed. It didn't matter to him whether it was the Rangers or Bonescrolls, but he needed direction.
Do you really? Drift looked like a molting insect sitting up in the hammock it had strung between two flower-vined trees. Your life, as I see it, has been strong and solitary. But the lusk was terrible. Much better to be a slave than to have to face that alone. Drift's teeth clacked in its head as it recalled the snake-pit rasp of voor psynergy and the depth-terror, vaster than oceans, that had gulfed its mind.