In the sway of his new power, he glimpsed the advanced forms: lightningflash moments of blue, fragmentary beings wintering in a vastness of tissue-light—too strange to see clearly. Animals like mist, whorling shapes, dissolved into one another with cattle sounds and bird cries. The quick pulsing strength of a bloodied hind rat bled into a starved hawk and the circling pace of an exhausted shark, their hazy psynergies pooling into the tight, hot power of his life—The vision filmed Sumner's eyes like a fever. He was breathing hard, and he had to clench his fists to regain a sense of himself. "Teeth dreams," he mumbled once, and his mind began to clear.Wait— there's more. I can show you your eth-power. . . .Sumner cut off the whining voice in his head. Frost had stiffened his clothing, and his muscles were leaden.Corby felt a surge of power as Sumner's mind circled in on itself trying to get reoriented. In that moment he realized that he was doomed. Sumner was too strong. The habit patterns and thought routines that Corby had once used to control him were gone. The howlie was empty as a voor mage, and Corby was thinned out, reduced to a mere im-pulse, and becoming vaguer each day. There was only one hope. But he would have to act swiftly. The voor surged into Sumner's consciousness with all his strength.The sudden assault of voor noise thrumped through Sum-ner's body. He lurched, hands to his head, feeling a chorus of cries too high for his ears. The pain blurred the focus of his eyes and snatched his strength. He dropped his hands and fell back, his head thudding to the ground, his teeth clashing.But the pain didn't crush him. It eased up. His body breathed again, and his blank brain filled with light. The voices of the voor dead drummed in his bones.The sun was rising over the rimrock, and a shaft of light glazed Sumner's eyes. He blinked, and the rapport between him and Corby shriveled. Help us, Sumner, the voor pleaded. Our journey must continue. But the broods can't unite with-out our godminds. We must go on. But we don't have the strength to leave without our godminds. Help us! A cortege of mournful voices writhed between his ears. The Delph is destroying us. You must help us to stop him. Shapeless cries flinched in his throat. The Delph . . .Sumner reined in his attention and let the lament wrin-kle out of hearing. He had listened enough to this voor. Whether it was really Corby or not he couldn't say. Voors were devious. That much he had learned from Jeanlu. He wanted nothing more to do with them.He swayed to his feet and stretched the ache out of his muscles. With the morning sunlight glinting off the dunes and warming his numbed flesh, he felt good. Bonescrolls' final command had been fulfilled. Now he could seek him out and get purged of this possession.No more voors. No more teeth dreams. There was enough illusion in his life without the memories of long dead worlds.But even so, as he staggered out over the windfolded sand, he marveled that such beings existed—beings of light, reshaping bodies, forever wandering. There was no loneliness like theirs.Nefandi stood in the shadow of a balanced rock staring across the distorting lenses of heated air on the desert floor. No life was anywhere to be seen among the cliffs of mangled and rusted iron. The white, depthless sky was empty even of clouds, and the ridges and defiles edged in black and purple wavered in the thermal currents like a hallucination.Why would anyone choose to live in this death hole? he wondered, gnawing on the frayed tip of an unlit cheroot. He removed his wide-brimmed leather hat and wiped the sweat from his face. The heat made him look sad, but there was still menace in his one red eye and in the glossy, rippled scar that stitched his dark face from the mirror-shard eye to the wide, clamped jaw. He placed his hat back over his spiked hair, took a swig of water from a flask, and strode out into the ponderous sun.The loose tawny trousers and shirt he wore were de-signed to protect him from the stinging sand, but the heat clung to them and baked his flesh. To keep his mind off his suffering, he thought back to where he had come from. A tame world of small, biotectured villages: Nanda with its bluffs and milk-blue lakes; Sidhe, the floating stone city; and Cleyre, exquisite Cleyre, its meadows exploding with aster and cyclamen, its trout streams clean as light. As a Rubeus-programmed assassin, his strongest memories were of the ice-valley laboratories of Graal, the Delph's stronghold. It was there that his new body was being shaped. But now was too lonely a time to be thinking of home.Nefandi slid into selfscan and picked up his pace, hug-ging the shadows of the wind-eaten rock walls. He entered the sun only when enormous potholes and fissures blocked his way. There was a chill in the sunlight, a somnolence that he knew well. The heat was killing him, and several times, each time sooner, he had to stop and refresh himself.Sitting in the dry heat of the shade, he cursed Rubeus for sending him here, though in the back of his mind he knew that if he had to choose over again, he would be right where he was now. How could he choose otherwise? Rubeus had promised him a new body—his third—if he was successful in this mission. Rubeus was the Delph's guardian. It was an artificial mind, an ort like Nefandi—but vaster, the size of a mountain and huge with power. It could easily weave him a new body, and for that privilege Nefandi would do anything.But why was I ordered to take the long way around? He cleared the sweat from his one red-veined eye and stood up. Heat waves floated in glassy layers, veiling the distances he had to cross. Rubeus had said this mission would be difficult. The person he was seeking was supposedly very powerful. He has to be to live in this hell maze.Sometime during the solar heat-crazed hours of the af-ternoon a raven began wheeling high over Nefandi's head. In the sensex embedded behind his mirror eye he could detect nothing unusual about it, but the bird was strange. It was following him, despite the shriveling heat and his attempts to lose it among the arches and tunnel rocks. Finally he had to kill it. He brought it down with a burst from his unsheathed field-sword. Unfolding its wings in his hands, he could see nothing that was unusual about it.Not long afterwards, as he followed a raintrail down an escarpment of smoldering red bordered with charcoal, an-other raven began ringing through the sky above him. He ignored it. His destination was very close now, and he had no time for desert anomalies. All around him lay a labyrinth of basins, towers, and fins of naked stone. The sandstone was crossbedded and checkered, seamed by old fault lines, and bizarrely sculptured. It took all his skill to cross the tilted ledges in the fearful glare of the sun.As he was edging along a ribbon-thin rim that curled over a death plunge into a kniferock ravine, the circling raven swooped. It clawed the back of his neck, and he yelped and danced for his footing. The sandstone powdered beneath his frantic weight and hissed into long, thin fractures. Only selfscan and luck carried him across before the rim crumbled and whispered into the abyss.Nefandi searched the sky and the rock walls for the raven, but it was gone. Apprehensively he moved on, scrambling over rocks that seesawed under his weight. By the time he reached the sand bowl of a saddle basin his clothes were pasty with fear sweat.Again he searched for the raven. Nothing living was in sight, yet there was a new feeling prickling around him. It was the sensation he had been coded to feel when he was near his objective. He had begun to detect it as he was sliding over the loose rock slabs, but only now could he concentrate enough to feel its source. A tall crest of rock, windsmoothed and arching like a wave, was emanating a dull lifenergy. The sensex detected nothing, but the more sensi-tive sensors embedded in his skull were definitely reacting to a life-presence—a strong life-presence.