Radix

In the courtyard below, the blossom-trellised wagon that had carried Miramol's maidens to their new home in Ladilena earlier that morning had returned. A young man was helping the new women out of the wagon, joking loudly as much to calm himself as them. He was strong and good-looking—his eyes puma-wide, his hair a proud mane. Even so, Ardent Fang would need a full season to break him in, to pass on the sense of mission that would serve him when his lust dulled. Soon enough the boy would be as bored as he was anxious now.
Ardent Fang stood and stretched, gazing beyond the green jumble of the riverain forest to where the land slurred to desert. Lotus Face had gone that way two days before to meet the magnar for the last time in his thrall, and the breeder reminisced about how thoroughly the man had changed: He moved more with the lanky ease of a tribesman now than the cautious reserve of a warrior, and he took more time with the women—
"Ardent Fang."
The breeder turned, and his features balked. Orpha was standing before him with a brood jewel in her hand, her body as thin and ghostly as fire.
"Come to the Barrow, breeder," the specter said, waver-ing into the invisible. "Come, quickly."
Ardent Fang bounded down the spiral stairs of the tower and sprinted through the muddy back lanes. When he ar-rived at the Barrow his thick legs were mired and his breath was tattered. Drift was waiting outside the turquoise-studded entrance with several of the Mothers. It took the breeder's hand, and the frenzy of his run thinned out.
"You must walk the Road again, breeder," Orpha said. She gripped his shoulder, and her face hooked into a silent cry. "The magnar is dying."
Bonescrolls gazed out at the blue night from the vantage of his cliff-cavern. Frost haze glowed along the horizon, and above it the moon moved across a night rainbow. He closed his eyes and leaned toward the west. Shadows swooped through him. He was gliding, the cool night air buffeting his sleek body. The stars moved in bands. The moonlit landscape with its broken contours wheeled below. Coyote tracks studded the bright sand slopes like dark blossoms. Saguaros stood solemnly along the ridgeline.
Nothing in sight was moving. And yet the raven Bone-scrolls had melled with was excited. Something had aroused it, but whatever it was, no trace lingered in the gray shadings of its memory.
Bonescrolls altered his breathing, and the dreamtime shifted. He entered a coyote perched on a rock ledge, scent-ing the air for the heat of the living. Its blood was buoyant under the draw of the full moon, raising the fine hairs in its ears, sending urgent ripples down the curve of its spine. No end to the sky. Shifting things—dark birds, moths—slipped through the air. The moon was luring everything upward. And a howl trembled in its throat, the frayed end of a song begun a long time ago and never finished.
But it stopped the cry at a growl. A hot, sticky scent flared its nostrils and tightened the scruff of its neck. Man-odor. It walked a wobbly, nervous circle and caught it again, cutting across the grain of the wind. It was blowing up from the young sisters' trails, the flat rock paths among the tall stones.
Bonescrolls moved the coyote down the rock ledge toward the stinging odor. It didn't want to get any closer, and the urine-itch between its legs became intense and forced it to stop. But it had gone far enough. Now it could see the man following the sisters' trail. The man's nightshining eyes fixed on it for a moment, gauging the distance between them.
Sumner strode out of the shadows, tall and loose, the moonlight gleaming across the lotus-burn of his face. Bone-scrolls smiled to himself and left the coyote to its lunar songs and its own fearless detachment.
He opened his eyes as a long, distant howl trembled among the rock towers. Sumner was close. He had come a long way without Bonescrolls being able to find him—and the young warrior wasn't even trying to hide. He was simply being cautious in the manner of any animal that knows its predators.
Bonescrolls yawned and stretched. Frost and starlight burned snow-blue on the rock shapes. He stood up and listened to the weaving coyote song. It was time to go down and meet his thrall for the last time.
A pulse of sadness thrummed in his chest, but it passed quickly. Sadness and joy and, high over the eroded desert, that old bone the moon. How many years had it taken him to see truly that they were all the same? In everything, identical forces were at work: tides, currents, flows and spirals of power.
The patterns of the folded rocks held his attention—the scars of glaciers, the same flow-wear lines seen in running water or in the heart's ventricles where blood has circled many, many years.
Sumner ambled over talus slopes and beneath the steep red walls of mesas the color of dried blood in the moonlight. An eddy of wind passed like a sigh, and he caught a faint sweet scent of burning juniper. He moved in that direction, sliding silently over the sand slopes. All his senses were alert, honed by the odd signs he had seen on his night journey: a lunatic raven careening strange patterns over the dunes; and a wild-eyed coyote close enough to touch, pissing where it stood.
A Serbota coyote song echoed its rhythms through his mind:
Coyote—yapping
At the moon. Like us
Not knowing what to ask for—
Starved
For what it already has,
Like a dream of sleepiness.
Sumner followed the burn-scent beneath corraded monoliths and over hogback ridges, and soon the sapless claw of a dead juniper appeared above the dreamlit dunes. A raven was roosting in the crown of the dead tree, and at the base, where tough black bark clenched stone, Bonescrolls sat. The flames of a small twig-fire danced before him.
Sumner returned the magnar's greeting and sat down beside the fire, laying his walking stick across his knees. He stared into Bonescrolls' gaunt face without expectation.
The old man stared back with hooded eyes. The eth's bodylight was a crystal-sharp yellow deeper than sunlight, and the harmony of his inner life was visible in the graceful pulsing of his aura. The magnar was well pleased, but to test Sumner's One Mind, he let his strong feeling rush out of him.
Sumner felt the psynergy as a sudden iciness in his abdomen. A green pain cramped his stomach, and he flinched. But he didn't hold back the cold flow. The psynergy furled deeply into him, and at the moment when the hurt became more than he could hold, the psynergy sluiced up his back and dissolved in the vastness behind his eyes. Sumner blinked and sat up taller. He knew what the magnar had done, and he was proud that he was clear enough for the power to pass through him. He felt open and strong as the wind.
Bonescrolls laughed and rubbed his belly. Sumner was so empty that the old man had almost fallen into
him. He kneaded the icy feeling out of his bowels and asked through a smile: "Why are you traveling in the dark?"
Sumner grinned quizzically, then recognized the inno-cent question as a challenge. But instead of searching for an answer, he listened to the longing cry of the wind. The ghost of his breath glowed in the firelight. "It's too cold to stay still."
Bonescrolls' grin widened, and his tough sun-scaled cheeks bulged. "It's colder where we're going."
Sumner frowned, disquieted by the magnar's allusion to death. "It won't matter when we get there." Sumner rolled a salty wafer of spit onto his tongue and hawked it into the flame. The fire snapped like an angry snake.
Bonescrolls' eyes glinted with laughter, and he nailed Sumner with them. "Even the truth is a boulder that can pin a monkey down for his whole life."
Sumner smiled. The game they were playing amused him, but Bonescrolls was right: Thought games were cumber-some and dangerous. He listened to the scratch of the cold wind blowing across the night-smelling depths. "What do we know?"