Radix

Nefandi unsheathed the silver-gold sword strapped to his back and approached the sweep of rock. A gully of frantic stones and boulders blocked a direct advance, and he circled the tower. At the side he stopped cold and crouched behind a sand-buffed outcropping. Beside the tower was a juniper crowded with silent ravens. They angled their small heads to watch him as he stepped into the clearing. They made no sound, and they barely stirred.
With his mind held rigidly in selfscan and his sword angled before him, he skirted the raven tree and ducked into a cave mouth at the base of the tower. As silently as his anxious legs could move, he mounted the steep incline fol-lowing the directional cues of his sensors. The person he had been sent to kill was up ahead at the top of the tower. Nefandi's sense of that person was strong, and he negotiated the forking and curving corridors without hesitation. But half-way to the top he was brought to a halt by an unusual sound.
He leaned on his sword and listened to a rustling, snap-ping noise. It was a moment before he realized what he was hearing, and then he bolted forward. The next instant, the first of the ravens clawed into his back. He slapped it off with his sword, not breaking his stride. The others followed quickly, and soon he was engulfed in black beating wings and ripping claws.
Not daring to activate his field inside the tower for fear that the sandstone would collapse around him, he was re-duced to slashing at the rabid birds with his sword. But there were too many of them, drumming at his back, snapping over his shoulders, darting their claws at his one real eye. Sticky blood pooled in his ears and splattered his cheeks. He lashed madly, stumbled and curled into a ball as the needlebeaks stabbed his back. With a gnashed cry, he activated the field of his sword. The ravens burst into the air above him in an explosion of feathers and torn shrieks. And higher, almost too high to hear, the sandstone walls whined and began to hiss.
Nefandi shut down the field and lunged to his feet. He dashed along the cramped corridor, pulling himself up the blind inclines, using his sensex in the far infrared to make out the pathways. A raven hammered into him from behind. He spun about and whacked it in half. Gasping, he waited with raised sword for the others, but there were no more.
After several more turns the darkness relented, and he followed the light and the cool air to a sweeping cavern lanced with skyholes and natural windows. Bonescrolls was seated cross-legged before one of the large oval openings, wearing linen trousers and a shirt of pristine white. He was smiling broadly, his wild white hair glowing in the afternoon sunlight like a nimbus.
"Welcome, Death," the magnar said, his face radiant as a dream. "Come in! Come in!"
Nefandi took a wary step forward. There was no doubt that this was the man he had been sent for. The sensors were trilling insanely in his head. Kill him now, the implanted command urged, and his sword arm raised and leveled his weapon. But he didn't fire. The race through the darkness, the ravens, and now this smiling old man left him feeling giddy.
"A drink?" Bonescrolls held up a clear jug half-filled with green wine. The magnar's hand was trembling, and looking closer, Nefandi saw that the old man was terrified.
The assassin lowered his sword and stepped forward, his sensex scanning the cavern for hidden weapons.
Bonescrolls poured out two cupfuls, frowning to master the tremor in his fingers. "I'm a little nervous, Death." He held out one of the blue-glazed mugs. "I'd hoped that I wouldn't be. After all, I've seen this coming for a long time."
Nefandi stood before Bonescrolls and waved away the drink. A trickle of blood dropped from his chin and splattered in the dust between them. Who was this old man? The kha around him was extraordinarily thin. Most of the life-energy was coiled into his abdomen. The man was obviously an advanced entity, but he looked like a drunk.
Bonescrolls nodded and tugged nervously at his hair. "Appearances always tell the truth—if you look close enough," he said, his voice splintering. "I am a drunk. I'm inebriated with life. That's why I came out here." He chuckled, making a high nasal sound like the whinny of an uneasy horse. "I thought this inhospitable land would wean me away from life. But there's beauty in being. I understand now that if I lived ten thousand years, I'd still want more."
A talker, Nefandi thought. He is a drunk. He watched the magnar sip his drink and blink slowly with satisfaction.
Bonescrolls put his mug down and looked up at Nefandi. His face was composed, his eyes alert and moist. "There's so much to know, to see, to feel." He sighed and flicked his eyebrows. "I don't suppose I could entreat you in any way to let me live?"
Nefandi stared back at him, cool as silver.
The old man nodded and put one hand over his heart. "Okay." His upper lip went taut. "My whimpering is over."
Nefandi brought up his sword, but as his hand moved to activate it, Bonescrolls' body unsprung. His legs kicked out, and the flagon of wine flew into Nefandi's face. The assassin dodged it clumsily, and his hand fear-twitched on the sword, firing a burst of power. The blast hit the ledge of the oval window with a scream of ripping rock. Shock-severed chunks of the ceiling collapsed in streamers of dust, and the whole face of the struck wall groaned mightily and dropped away.
Bonescrolls had rolled clear of the falling wall, but a massive slab of the ceiling slammed him flat, pinning both of his legs. Nefandi had leaped back and hunched against a far wall. As the dust churned and settled he stepped forward, a wild tic at the scarred corner of his mouth and a dark look in his smoky red eye. He stalked up to where Bonescrolls was stretched out on his back and stomped the heel of his boot into the old man's belly.
The magnar wheezed and smiled, his thick lips flecked with pink froth. "Even truth is a boulder." He laughed softly, his face luminous until Nefandi blew off the top of his head.
"Stupid old man," he grumbled, turning away from the inert body. He went over to the shattered edge of the cavern where a new, wide vista had been blasted open. Whiskey-colored light angled between the buttes and spires. In the east, long bars of clouds were gathering, driftwood-blue in the late sun.
Killing's unimportant, he told himself as he gingerly fingered the claw marks on his face. We 're all killed by something sooner or later. It's dignity that counts, and there would have been more for that old man if he hadn't strug-gled. Stupid fool. A man with that much kha should be ready to live his death.
He sheathed his sword and kicked the wine jug over the broken edge of the cavern. His work was not yet finished. There was one more death between him and his new life. A Masseboth soldier in lusk had to be put out of his misery. He lived with the Serbota, a primitive tribe several days away. At least this would be a mercy death.
Nefandi didn't like killing hermits or old men. He didn't look back as he left, but he did wonder what Bonescrolls had meant: Truth is a boulder. The man was a soak, all right. A real talker. Who was he? Ach! Useless to ponder.
The sky was smoke-blue with dawn when Drift and Ardent Fang came out of the north. They approached Bonescrolls' rock tower slowly and diffidently. Ardent Fang led the way, eyes sliding warily,
knife drawn. He had shared Drift's nightmares of shards and lumps of bloody flesh and bones in the smoke of bones, and he woke each time chewing his screams.
For Drift, it had been worse. After the second day on the Road, it had experienced shadowed dreams of voices at a distance, a numbing crack of thunder, and then a lightning-jagged pain in its legs pinning it flat in the abstraction of its sleep. The black core of the nightmare was a spasm in its stomach, the odor of blood, and a blow that rent the top of its skull and squashed it dark.
The Road, too, had not felt right. A malevolent pres-ence, dark and preoccupied, had been in the area not long before. In the blue dawn shadows they had even spotted the tracks of a large man. Drift wouldn't go near the prints. A glassy red light glowed over them, the bloodlight of a deadwalker, a living corpse. In the muted sky flocks of ravens circled silently.