The hot twisting cord of deva energy flared green-white in empathy with the voor's thoughts. It understood One Mind and the great joy of a species sharing its psynergy. Its power buffeted stronger and focused on Corby, lifting him off his feet and into the air.He hung motionless in the still night sky with its thin fire-shiftings. Blazing rags of light snapped around him, and he dropped down the mountain with the deva. As he glided over the wind-scalloped snow, he probed his body for the deepest cell of its damage. Both feet were dead, and the cold had hammered the feeling out of his fingers.Corby relaxed, and the radiant strength skirled through him as he tumbled over the tops of fir trees. He guided the power through the looseness of his bones to the hurt flesh. The ripped quilt of cells in the frozen skin warmed swiftly, and a frenzy of liquid heat washed its turbulent healing through him. Within moments, his flesh was nimble and full of prickly touches.At the edge of the snowfield, in a wheeling fury of light, the deva stopped and lowered him into the snow. The firewheel blazed for a strong moment and then blinked into toppling darkness.Corby sat in the snow, soaked with joy. He relaxed his body into the psynergy rafting through him, and he began to rise again. Tufts of blue light bristled in his hair and on the tips of his fingers and boots. He hovered over the bauchy snow, and his skin crawled with the flux.Everywhere, voors felt him: an obscure, ghostly spell. Most dismissed it as the underglimmer of orphaned memories, the voor dead, or indigestion. But a few with strong kha who knew their bodies well recognized the call. Dai Bodatta.An ecstatic mania quavered in him. He raised a hand and stared at it. The whole planet was there: the sky reflected in the blue veins, a resinous mud-light glowing in the flesh, and a horizon with clouds in each fingernail. It awed him: the completeness—the unity! As long as Sumner was uncon-scious, this power was his.He flexed the new strength in his hands and legs and lowered himself by invisible strings. When his feet touched the ground, he felt the earthdreaming enter him and he began to dance. The earthdreaming was the kha of the planet, and as it passed through him, it merged with the kha of the deva and made the life in him flush stronger. Sparks splut-tered as his feet kicked the stiff mud.Without him, the voor knew, the body would have died. Perhaps Sumner would not acknowledge this lifedebt, but to Corby that didn't matter. He had proven to himself his worth to this organism. He wasn't simply a parasite. Even if he was never allowed to be conscious again, this life belonged as much to him now as to Sumner, and he danced his great happiness.He swung himself into a slow, majestic spin and crouched over his gravity, his legs drumming blue flames. Flashes leaped like rats, a swarm of twisting devils, spraying the night with bright lingulate flames.Corby danced until dawn, when the ion tide in the upper atmosphere shifted with the solar wind. This body is riddled with half-souls, he told the deva, and I'm the least. I'm grateful you came for me.Hearing this, the deva moved on, vanishing with the feathery skyfires. I'm caught in the liquid of this brain, Corby thought after it, mind-smudged with the loss of outside-psynergy. I have no will. I'm a falling dream. . . .Wine light ruddied the highest peaks, and Corby sensed himself becoming vaguer as Sumner's consciousness began to stir. Blood burns thin as air! But I must not forget. … In the eighteen months since the lusk began, the starbalance had shifted. I'm becoming less, the less I act. I. . . Corby wa-vered . . . must not forget. I am the secret strength. I fall from shape to shape. I fall with time in its circle…. When the last of the deva's psynergy vanished, Corby's awareness fragmented and he collapsed into the mud of his dancing.Several Serbota tribesfolk crouched at the base of a granite ridge staring at the red traces of dawn among the endless mountains. At the top of a long rubble-strewn incline the snowfields began, an ethereal blue in the early light. Up there, Sumner's body lay sprawled in a circle of trampled slush. A few Serbota warriors were circling it charily. The day before, they had fled into the wastes of Skylonda Aptos, pursued by the Masseboth hellraiders. During the night the folk had seen the ghost-lights moving down the mountain, and they had approached, knowing death was closing in from behind, seeking divine help.The women and two of the warriors remembered Sum-ner from Miramol, and the awe they had felt for him then had become religious after seeing the deva-dance. The women called from the rocks, urging the men to let his Power be. "He's the magnar's child—a sorcerer," an old woman cried, and the warriors backed off. Finally, one of the hunters stalked over and touched Sumner's shoulder. The body was warm and smelled of lightning. Encouraged, a young warrior approached, took Lotus Face's head in his hands and tried to shake him awake.At that instant, Sumner was plunging through the dark-ness of a whooping, gut-cramping dream. Hands lunged out of the darkness and seized him by his ears. They were blue, necrotic hands with a grip severe as steel. In their taloned hold Sunnier squirmed helplessly, and a voice broke through him: You 're twisting yourself to pieces, boy. It was his fa-ther's voice, soft and tough as crushed leather. Sling yourself away —go ahead. Run after spirit dreams, like your mother. Send kha, shadowshoot, climb mountains. See what it gets you. A crack in time? The end of pain? Or just a masturbat-ing flash? You know what I'm telling you. Your back is a road, boy— a road for your shadow and all the darkness of the world to cross.A hollow-faced skull goggling with eyes of insane voltage reared out of the blackness, and Sumner lashed out with his right fist. The supernatural strength of his blow bashed through the dream, and he pulled awake to see himself standing above the fallen body of a Serbota warrior.It had happened so swiftly—limbs slashing open like a butterfly-blade, the young warrior collapsing backwards, his head slung far to the side—that the other tribesfolk were left motionless. Comprehension filled Sumner's eyes as he stared at the boy he had knocked down; he remembered the dream and, deeper, the long unearthly wail of the wind, the ham-mering of the cold—and the voor and the deva saving his life.Sumner knelt in the slush, his body suddenly sodden. The warrior he had hit was dead. His head was knocked sideways to his shoulder, and his sky-gray eyes reflected the golden snowpeaks. Mutra, I'm powerless, Sumner realized in a swell of choking grief, and then caught himself. His aware-ness sharpened to selfscan, and the constriction in his throat cleared. I'm powerless, all right. He let the anguish in him speak. I'm voor-crazed and luckless—powerless to live or even die my own life.He put his hand on the boy warrior's face and felt the last warmth wisping into the cold air. At that moment and by that last heat of flesh-fire, he took a vow: Ecstasy warrior, your death is my freedom. Foc shadowshooting. Foc selfscan. I'm not afraid of anything— and I'm not going to hold myself back anymore.He felt his face buckling, and he let the tears flow. With them came a forlorn anger and the hard shape of words: I'm blind strength. I destroy everything that finds me bearable. I killed Ardent Fang, and my absence killed Bonescrolls. Pain is my blood. He wept wildly, and the Serbota backed away.As he calmed, the silent words went on: I'm a voor. If I weren't, I would have died in that mountain storm. I'm voor, and I don't understand or think that I can. But I fathered Corby. Though Jeanlu duped me and tried to kill me, Corby is my son—and he's with me, in my brain. I can't hide in my fear anymore. I have to face it: I'm a voor.Sumner fixed his eyes on the corpse's startled expres-sion. I hurt and I hunger. Pain is my religion. I'm just a man. But there's more. With the Serbota I felt a body-happiness deeper than orgasm. I knew lifelove. I touched the world's soul. I want more of that. And because I fear nothing, I can face it: I want more.