Radix

Nefandi moved in a tiger's slouch up the incline of the knoll. The heat on his back was a heavy mantle that tangled up his legs and slowed his walk. He squinted and spit out the taste of dust. He would be very relieved when this assign-ment was over. The howling of the women and children, the aggressive cries of the males, and the oppressive heat made everything look malevolent. Even the silverwood lodges ahead, rippling with emerald kha, looked threatening. Nefandi knew from his programming that the hermit he had killed had been revered by these people.
He turned up the force of his field and then turned it down again immediately. The drag of the energy made walk-ing too difficult. He would just have to stay alert. His dark, furious face swung from side to side as he reached the top of the knoll. Most of the lodges he saw were empty. But one was alive with kha.
Nefandi didn't bother to announce himself. He tried the sliding door, and finding it unlocked, he shoved it aside and strode in. A wall of heat with the cooked smell of sweat and stale incense confronted him and stopped his advance. The light in the large room was wrinkling with shadows and smoke, and at first only his sensex registered the others: a verdant cloud of kha swirling tighter. His eyes sharpened, and he saw them—forty androgs, each one small and bur-nished black like silver idols smoky with age. The tight eyes
beneath the carved eyelines fixed him with serpent rigidity, and before he could move, their kha cramped to a miniature thunderhead in the lap of a blue-robed androg. The thunder-head exploded, the force of it lifting Nefandi off his feet and dashing him against the doorjamb so mightily it splintered outward.
Even through the buffer of his field, the assault was so strong that he blacked out. He was unconscious for only a moment, but in that time the crowd of ne swarmed over him. They were desperately trying to get at him through the field when his alertness jarred back into place.
Infuriated, Nefandi jumped his field to maximum. The sudden burst of power mangled the ne around him, explod-ing those who were touching the field and smashing the others against the walls of the lodge.
"Abominations!" he howled as he leaped to his feet, sliding on the pooling blood and almost falling. He shut down the field so that he could fire bone-crushing spurts of force at the remaining ne. The short, pan-faced creatures scattered, rushing for the windows and small back doors, but Nefandi was too fast for them. In moments, the horrible, gibbous cries of the ne were silenced, and the room was tangled with the blood-sprawls of the dead.
Nefandi stalked angrily out of the lodge, his fingers trembling. The impact of the energy that had knocked him out was still singing along the curve of his skull. He moved swiftly among the moss-shawled trees and down the incline of the knoll toward the heart of the village. His anger was a knot in his throat, and it squeezed tighter as he realized how treacherously petty his attack had been; the voor he wanted was nowhere in sight.
In the central courtyard of the village, before a natural mist-spring steaming among lichen-darkened trees, the laugh-ing warriors of the Serbota had gathered. A bull's-horn forma-tion of men with fishing spears flanked a line of slingshot-armed warriors. In the trees, a squad of hunters with blowguns waited silent as cats. The screams of the dying ne had shaken even the boldest of the tribesmen, and as Nefandi strode into sight with sword in hand and the air flimmering around him as if it were heat-crazed, nervous laughter and the awed name of the Dark One spasmed through the ranks.
The tribesmen trembled with fury and edged toward him, the fishing spears lowered, all of them pointing at his chest. He moved to shut down his field, and as his hand tightened on the hilt control, a brusque female voice shouted over the mumbled chanting of the warriors. In the mounting furor, Nefandi might not have noticed the voice, but he heard it distinctly in his left ear, spoken in a language he understood. Stop! No more killing! It was as much a tele-pathic as an auditory voice. The tribesmen pulled up their spears and danced anxiously around their fading chant.
Nefandi looked over his shoulder. A hefty old woman in a black shift was hobbling toward them, her pasty face set in a grimace of effort. She came up to the edge of the field, the small hairs raising all over her body. Why are you killing my people? Her voice snapped in his mind, out of synch with her lips.
Nefandi stared at this woman, who stared back bold as brass. Her face was puffed, and her lank, age-yellowed hair and heavy jaw gave her a masculine cast. There was a watch-ful cunning in her black eyes and a sly suggestion of dark humor in the surly curve of her mouth. The pale round of her forehead caught the sun like metal.
"I was provoked," Nefandi replied, his voice muffled by the field. "I mean no harm. I'm looking for one man—a voor lusk living in this village."
The old woman's kha shifted subtly across her eyes, and Nefandi saw that she knew.
I'm Orpha, and I'm responsible for the well-being of these people. There was no anger, no edginess to the sound of her voice or the feel of it in his mind. She was uncannily serene, and that chilled his anger to a qualmish dissatisfaction.
"You know who I'm talking about," Nefandi said. "Take me to him."
You must swear by whatever is sacred to you that there will be no further harm to my people. She was serious. Her eyes were fixed on him, and they didn't flinch when his dark face creased in a cruel smile.
"Nothing is sacred, woman. But I assure you, all I want is this man."
Orpha lidded her eyes and was silent. When she opened them she wiped the sweat from her brow, and turned away. Come with me.
Nefandi followed her back down the tusk-lined boule-vard to a crude, turquoise-studded hole at the base of a rock mound. He stood diffidently at the lip of the hole, scanning the darkness: no heavy equipment, no metal, no mechanical traps. He shut down the field and lowered himself into the burrow after Orpha.
Phosphor-tendrils were looped over the roughhewn walls, making the rock look varnished. He stayed close to Orpha, his hand on his sword hilt, breathing shallowly of the dank, incense-stained air. From a distance came the splash of un-derground cascades. His face tightened in the earth-chill misting off the walls, and he had to close his good eye to see clearly with his sensex in the vague light.
They walked past empty chambers decorated with spider-intricate embroidery, grass hammocks, and
wooden imple-ments smooth and lustrous as glass. A curving rock-slab stairway took them down past fans of crystal sediment and spurs of black, greasy-looking rock to a high-domed grotto.
A dozen elderly women sat or stood among glazed sili-ceous deposits shaped like giant mushrooms. Most of them were distorted, their faces and hands silver-scaled in patches, their features bizarrely exaggerated. Sitting prominently on a rock-dome, Orpha and an ancient woman without eyes were the only whole-looking ones.
Behind the women, visible in the magnetic range, was a haze of power the color of his sword blade. It cut a straight line through the grotto, and he recognized it as the power channel he had followed through the desert.
"Why is he here, Orpha?" the blind woman asked, her empty eyes locked on Nefandi.
"He wants Lotus Face."
"But the magnar entrusted him to us," one of the other women protested. She had a sharp weasel face, and she signed obscenely at Nefandi as she spoke.
"The magnar's ward was ours for one year," Orpha re-plied. "That's over now."
"And besides," the blind one said, "the magnar is dead."
"By this one!" the weasel-face shrilled. "Will we help our own murderer?"
Orpha scowled. "He's killed enough already. Let's be done with him."
"What do you think, Jesda?" the weasel asked.