Radix

When they came within sight of Bonescrolls' tower, nei-ther of them expected to find him alive. Yet, as they closed in and saw the collapsed wall and the dark hole at the summit, their hearts constricted. Ardent Fang scrambled up the mound of fallen rock and was the first to see Bonescrolls. He dropped to his knees, hands over his face, and howled.
Drift saw the corpse through Ardent Fang's eyes. Its mind flinched, and it walked numbly around to the cave entrance. By the time it wound its way through the dark corridors and entered the cavern, its shock had settled and the sight of the body was less fiercesome than the rage it felt. A rasping click rattled in its throat, and it fell to the ground and thrashed among the rocks.
Ardent Fang mastered his grief, and in the lilac light he began gathering the pieces of the shattered skull. Overnight the blood had caked, glueing the dead flesh to the rock floor. White ants swarmed over the body, and the putrid deathsmell thickened as the day warmed.
It was noon before the ants were plucked from the body and all the bits of flesh were scraped off the ground and gathered in a scrap of torn cloth. Ardent Fang carried the body down through the darkness to the sandy field before the tower.
With a stone wedge fastened to a lopped segment of his walking stick, Ardent Fang fashioned an ax and brought down the tall juniper. Drift arranged the wood into a pyre as Ardent Fang cut it up. Together they sat before the blazing heap, the devil harp warbling a mournful tune, the ne chanting:
Like the thunder you begin
Too late
To remember the light. . . .
Sumner followed the nut-sweet fragrance of burning ju-niper across the evening. At Bonescrolls' rock abode, smoke idled up, flames muttered. Both Ardent Fang and Drift were inert, too wasted by grief to move. They watched him approach, and they saw the emptiness in his face and the remote gaze of his eyes.
Drift watched for a moment in the felted silence and noted the wan, fatigued light around his body. The
magnar is dead.
The moment distilled to a burning drop of feeling, but Sumner remained expressionless. The bruising hurt quelled almost immediately. Bonescrolls was dead. That thought was a thinning filament in the emptiness of his mind—a void that hours before had contained countless deaths on unnumbered worlds. He squatted in the dust and watched plum-colored stars wink on above the horizon.
Ardent Fang felt a throb of anger at Sumner's coolness. He wanted to grab that blank face by its long hair and drag it over to the pyre and force it to see the charred corpse. But the moment was sacred, and he restrained himself. Drift, too, was disturbed by Sumner's aloofness. Didn't he perceive how great a loss this was? But when the seer reached out with its mind to touch Sumner, it was like edging up to a windy cliff. It backed off and married its mind to the shadows and its grief.
Sumner was emotionally void. He was not even moved by the realization that the voor he had mastered with his One Mind would continue to live in his body. He was the eye of the moment through which everything threaded: the pearled light of dusk, the silky smoke, the red embers in the pyre malign as eyes.
Fatigue ghosted through him, and stray thoughts, cum-bersome as sleep, narrowed his awareness: The magnar is dead—no freedom from voors now. . . Those thoughts dropped away. His exhaustion dropped away. Even his body seemed to drop away. The air smelled slow—the sweet, cold, piny flavor of smoldering desert wood. Pools of silent energy circled around him, turning with the evening colors. In the corners of dusk, the tops of the highest buttes were catching the last slips of light and shining with time.
Sumner closed his eyes, and the darkness was wormed with blue threads of light. A voice muffled with distance spoke within him: We are one now. It was Corby. Sumner sensed the voor drawing closer. He had the strength to stop him, to turn the alien back. But he was empty. Everything was passing through him. The voor was very close to his senses now, curiously alive and full of loneliness. The wild static of the voor dead browsed in the far distance.
We are one, the voor spoke, quiet as moonlight. I make no demands. But I am within you. I see all that you see. And all that I have is yours. Let us share what we are.
Stoneflakes glinted in the dark depths and Sumner was aware of his tranced body knitting itself close to him. A wheeling darkness moved through him, and when he opened his eyes he was sitting alone in the pearl-gray light of dawn.
The tracks of Ardent Fang and Drift wandered off to the north. The pyre was burned out, reduced to a charred circle in the sand. Without thinking it, but knowing that it was a voor desire, he went over to the exhausted fire and scooped a handful of the ash into his side pouch. He turned toward Miramol and began to walk. He didn't know why he was going there or what he intended to do, but it felt right.
"After all," he said aloud to the chemical desert, "the world is feeling."
He passed clay pits where mud-clotted distorts stooped to their work and did not see him go by. In the wide fields beyond, smoke muscled close to the ground. The distorts were heating stone kilns, tempering metal and hardening wood. When they spotted him they cast warding signs in his direction and sent up a shrill alarm on their cricket whistles. But Nefandi ignored them. He moved as silently as the smoke he passed through, his sword strapped to his back.
The women and children in the vegetable plots had already scattered by the time he moved between their shaggy green rows. At the treeline, he brought down a young war-rior he had spotted with his sensex aiming a blowgun at him from high in a baobab. When the youth thudded to the ground, a loud wailing started in the grass huts.
Nefandi scanned the houses for voor kha. He moved down the length of the tusk– and rib-lined boulevard, his body sheathed in the protective field of his sword. The well-carpentered huts and the immaculate flower lanes shimmered through the field, and a rock tossed from a tree bounced off the air around him, a foot from his head.
At the end of the boulevard he spotted the knoll of silverwood lodges with their trellises of jungle bossoms. Blue-green kha pulsed behind the walls, and he moved in that direction. Along the way he studied the distorts who were studying him from behind the trees and moss curtains. They were symbio-mutants—that is, their mutations were a neces-sary component of their lives. They used frequent triple-jointed gestures and ear and scalp expressions that an undistorted human would be incapable of. That was possible, he made a mental note, only because of genetic phase-drifting. The mutations were not random. At least most of them weren't. A fifth of the distorts he had seen so far had dysfunctions that easily would have selected against them without tribal support—like that legless woman in the doorway to her hut and that blind man under the tree with the fishing net in his lap. Didn't a tribe advanced enough to cultivate androgs understand the long-term benefits of selective life-privilege? Ach! Useless to ponder.
The ne watching Nefandi's approach from the peepholes of their lodges were appalled. He was a killer by the smell of his mind, and worse, he was a deadwalker. The shadow-red lifelight about his body was sluggish, circling slowly through his chest and brightening only around his head. He was obviously the one who had slain the magnar, though why he was coming to them they couldn't guess. None of them, however, cared. The loss of their benefactor was too heavy on their minds, and they resolved without speaking to kill him.