Radix

Nefandi shut down the field and rolled to the center of the pear grove. His sensors were squealing, and he did a quick scan of the surrounding foliage. A glaucous bodylight was shifting stealthily through the undergrowth—yellow-golden, the size of a man. He fired a tight burst at it. The leaves danced and scattered, and the kha-light flashed to nothing.
Still on his belly, he scanned the terrain again. The androg was staring at him through the quag of his compan-ion's entrails, too stunned to move. A bird chattered tenta-tively, and the derelict sounds of fleeing monkeys muffled away. The sensors in his skull were quiescent, and he got to his feet slowly. It was finished.
Cleyre was very close now. He could smell the chicory coffee he would have while sitting on his blossom-arbored patio. He smiled away his fantasy and went over to inspect the body. Was his victim relieved to die—happy to be liber-ated from the horror of his lusk? Or had the voor become familiar to him? Perhaps they had shared a life. Useless to ponder.
He used his sword to force aside the tangled brier. Draped over a fallen tree, head cleaved open, was a silver puma. Nefandi stood baffled and was still pondering how an animal could have had so highly developed a kha when Sumner unfolded from his cover of brambles behind the big cat. He had no kha. The voor was holding all his psynergy deep within.
Nefandi staggered back, but Sumner grabbed his sword arm. He gripped it so hard the muscles unflexed, and the weapon dropped. Nefandi's mind lurched. The black rainbow-glossed face transfixed him—the eyes flat, indifferent, and slow . . .
Nefandi's free arm gouge-slashed and was slapped away. He twisted, but the hand clamping his arm squeezed tighter, tugging him forward. A knife flashed in Sumner's hand, and Nefandi saw the blade slide between his ribs. A scream kicked in his throat. He bucked and thrashed, a dumb hilar-ity whirling inside him, spinning itself out. His whole body stiffened, and he sagged to the ground, drained, only a shape.
Sumner let the body fall. He looked at the limbs folded like wet cardboard, the fright-glare in the one eye, and a finger twitching, frantic for a signal from the stopped brain. He looked closely to see what it was this man felt. Fear— glinting off the mirror-shard, soaked into the blood-darkening shirt.
He bent over to wipe his blade on Nefandi's shirt, and the hushed voice of the voor opened in him. You trusted me, Sumner, and I didn't fail you. We 're as good as one now. We 're the same.
He sheathed his knife, picked up Nefandi's sword, and stepped over the body.
Drift, blood-splattered and limping, met him in the clear-ing of the pear grove. Its bead eyes were clouded, and at first Sumner felt nothing from it but a cold mist, shadowy and languid. Then the seer's voice was in his mind: Why didn'tyou save him? It held up its hands, slick with Ardent Fang's blood. You saw what was happening. Why didn'tyou save him?
"The voor was holding my kha back, Drift. If I had moved or even thought, we'd both be dead now. I had to let Fang go."
Drift stared at him, its bloody hands raised. I thought you were human. Its eyes glistened, and its look frayed. It turned away. You 're more voor than man.
Sumner watched after the seer until it passed among the trees and out of sight. Nothing is ever lost— it's just on its way back, he said to himself.
That thought began a slow loop through his mind—a mantra that set his feet moving, that marched him out of the forest and into the sun-veiled landscape of Skylonda Aptos.
He walked hard through the primeval chaos of faulted, uplifted, and folded rock. In a desolate spot he buried Nefandi's sword, and then continued his grief-march. When the sky filled with colored vapors, he sat with his back to a stone arch and stared out at the darkening reef of clouds. He had killed Ardent Fang—the way he had killed Bonescrolls, by inaction. He had let the human love in him die. He was a voor, and that awareness immobilized him. Dervishes of red dust spun over the arid flats. Llyr glinted above the horizon, small and glassy. A cold wind deepened.
At dawn Sumner awakened to the sound of metal punch-ing the air—engines. The noise was terrifying coming across the barren and shattered land. He mounted the stone arch and saw a convoy of yellow and brown troop carriers rum-bling across the mangled terrain. Green flags stenciled with black and white pillars were stretched over the sides of the treaded vehicles.
Sumner sprinted over swells and folds of liver-maroon rock to intercept the lead carrier. When he was spotted, the convoy bawled to a stop and several men in desert camou-flage suits jumped down, rifles ready.
Sumner identified himself and was quickly hustled onto the top deck of the point carrier. With a screech of fatigued metal, the convoy clawed forward again.
Sumner held on to the deck rail, watching the horizon sway. After the commander put aside his radio, Sumner asked: "What's going on here?"
The commander was young and straw-blond with pale, vivid squint lines radiating from his eyes. He looked Sumner over with a curious and amused expression. "Your cover's impeccable, Kagan." The pale etchings in his flesh vanished in the folds of his smile. "I'd heard the Rangers went all out, but you're amazing." His little eyes widened to take in Sum-ner's braided hair, colorful thread-stitched ears, jaguar-toothed neckband, and faded loincloth. "What tribe are you surveying?"
"Serbota."
"Ah." His small eyes became deadlier. "Then you can be very useful to us."
Simmer's insides tightened.
One of the radios squawked several code phrases. The commander stepped past Sumner and peered south across the jogging terrain. "Here they come."
Several black specks hobbled on the horizon, swimming closer.
"You're taking Miramol?" Sumner asked, his voice vague.
"Taking it?" The commander faced him, amused by the thinness of Sumner's voice. "We don't take distorts. There's been some voor activity in the area, and we're going to wipe out the tribes that might shelter them."
Thunder trundled out of the south, expanded to a roar, and ripped the sky above them with a scream wider than ears could hold. Four black-hulled strohlkraft howled overhead, arrowing toward the horizon.
Sumner keeled back against the deck rail. The folds of rock streaming by, the swells and grabens, the benches, spires, and synclines linked and continued. Sumner watched them with numb eyes. They were blending together in his tears. They were becoming one.
The anguish of seeing his tribe destroyed was too strong for Sumner. Violence flexed in his chest, and he knew he would corpse many men if he didn't get away.
He jumped off the troop carrier and rolled when he hit the rocky ground. Behind him the commander was yelling: "Get back here, Kagan! You don't have permission to leave!"
Sumner kept walking, the heat and the dust splashing at his ankles.
"You're deserting!" the commander shouted, and one of the troopers sighted his rifle and looked for permission to fire. When the commander nodded, the trooper aimed, but Sumner was gone.
Several of the other men had seen him somersault be-hind a sand drift, and the commander dispatched a dozen men to track him down. They fanned over the broken land and scanned from the vantage of rock pinnacles, but they never saw that ranger again.
the blood's horizon
Sumner walked north, letting his voorsense lead him into the mountains. At the snowline, where jagged rime rocks burned in the scallop rays of the sun, he found a ledged cave hidden from the wind. He cleared out the stone shards and sat down against the back wall.