Radix

The anxious whispers of the tribesfolk carried in the cold air, and Sumner got to his feet. He faced the Serbota, want-ing to say something to calm them. But as his breath coiled to speak, he felt the earth turning under him. The ground was grinding on its axis; he sensed it moving in his feet, wrenching up his legs, slipping wrongly through his spine, and jarring out the cracks in his skull. It was the voor in him feeling the planet's kha. As the earthdreaming passed through him, his senses extended into voor telepathy. And he saw—
A convoy of troop carriers dotted the desert floor and hundreds of brown-uniformed troopers were swarming up the slopes of this mountain, attracted by the deva's fire. In minutes they would be in sight.
Sumner looked about for cover, but the terrain was open except for clumps of alpine shrub. He stared at the tribesfolk who had gathered around the man he had killed. They stared back at him with nervous beseeching, knowing the soldiers were coming, not really knowing who he was except that he had wept for one of them. An ice-sheet above them groaned in the sunlight like a dreamer.
"No place to run," he mumbled in Serbot. "Stay." He waved them to sit. His mind was a vacant, skimpy music. The voor was wasted, too weak to help. His kha was vitiated by the effort of healing Sumner's ice-burned body. Swervings of sound squirreled out of the skull-dark, and he ceased in-listening. "We stay here," he said in Massel, looking down to the treeline where the first Masseboth troopers had appeared. "I won't let them kill you."
He stepped past the folk with a clumsy heaviness, only now feeling the hollowness of his strength. With slow, blunt movements he paced among the hawkweed, waving the sol-diers closer. An ocean of feeling opened in him, and his mind skated on its surface like an insect. Miramol was gone, rapt in the afterworld of his memory with the other dead he felt for. Bonescrolls was in One Mind, Ardent Fang in the whorl. Drift had gone back to Paseq, and the Mothers had followed. They were dead, thinged. Sumner wanted to stop feeling them.
He moved without the poetry of an aware creature, and the soldiers, seeing his eel-black face and size, were balking. Three had crouched and were sighting him with their rifles.
"I'm not a distort, you jooches!" he shouted down at them. "I'm an advance-ranger." He yelled out his code num-ber and name, and two minutes later eight soldiers approached swiftly in arrowhead formation. Sumner signed for the Serbota to remain seated, but two of them bolted. They spartled upfield a short distance through the shrubs before the sol-diers opened fire.
"Don't shoot," Sumner ordered, swaying toward the riflemen. A youthful officer with a death's-grin face and a bulls neck grabbed his arm. culler was stenciled in green over his heart. "Stop those men," he told the officer. "I'm Masseboth. A ranger."
"You're a deserter," Culler said softly, pointing a ma-chine pistol into Sumner's face. "A convoy officer says you left his carrier against his direct command. That's desertion." He unclasped a set of heavy manacles from his belt and held them up level with his gun. "Which hand do you want, soldier?"
Sumner stared at him with a face as flat and integral as a rock, and the brain waves that sine through striking serpents twitched in his heart. He wanted to kill this man, but the weakness in his muscles gulfed that thought. If the Serbota were going to survive, he had to submit. Reluctantly, he held out his arms, and the manacles clanged over his wrists. Behind him rifle fire coughed.
"Don't kill the tribesfolk." Sumner pleaded, but his eyes were cold with threat.
"Folk?" Culler gruffly turned Sumner around and pointed at the squatting Serbota. "Those are distorts, mister."
Higher up the slope, the two runaways were thrashing through the brush, rifle-fire cutting the earth around them.
"Let them go." Strain was in Sumner's voice as he com-pressed the inside of his arms, squeezing his hands deeper into the grip of the steel cuffs—but the officer heard the effort as anguish.
"Look at them, Kagan." Culler waved his machine pistol at the Serbota, but where he saw bone-pinched eyes and twisted features pink as pigflesh, Sumner saw the people he loved—and that love gave him the strength to twist tendon over bone and pop both hands out of the steel loops that bound him.
At the sound of the manacles clacking to the ground, Culler spun about to face his prisoner, gun leveled. Sumner sidestepped and smoothly took the officer's gun arm in a crushing grip and twisted free the pistol. With his other hand he caught the weapon and aimed it from his hip at Culler's shock-loose face. "Call your men off," Sumner whispered, his gaze thin as blood.
"Those are coiled steel—how the foc …"
"Call them."
The officer waved the riflemen back, and they held fire.
"Now—smile," Sumner commanded, and Culler's lips thinned crookedly. "I'm your prisoner—you should be pleased. You've taken a ranger. But these tribesfolk are free. Aren't they?"
Culler's teeth meshed. He looked fiercely at Kagan and saw past the engraved weather of his face, past the flat bones and the sand color around the black burn to the life in him. "You can't save them, Kagan. The whole desert's covered with our hellraiders."
Sumner cocked the pistol, and Culler's face unclenched. The officer nodded, glancing swiftly to his sides to see if his men realized what was happening. But they were blithely meandering through the sparse shrub looking for distorts.
The Serbota, who were watching Sumner fixedly, rose at his summons and approached. "Massel—who speaks it?" Sum-ner asked them, and an old man with a horn-knobbed fore-head limped forward.
"I do," the Serbota said. "My father traded with corsairs and, as a young man, I bartered with convoy pirates."
Sumner waved him closer, then looked deeply into Cull-er's hate-twitching eyes. "I'm going to kill you," he told him with a tight voice, "unless you do exactly what I say. Walk twelve paces back and watch your men approvingly. No hand signals. No cries for help. Do you understand what I want?"
Culler nodded once, stiffly, and backed off. When he was out of earshot, Sumner talked to the old Serbota tribes-man without looking at him: "Three hard days' walk the other side of those mountains is a colony highway. Follow it south-east five or six days and you'll come to Carnou. You can sell desert roots and kiutl in one of the backstreet garment shops. But don't stay there long. The army garrisons its northeast brigade just outside town. They're always looking for desert-ers and distorts. Keep the folk well out of sight. Avoid the highways. Take the foot-trails south until you come to Onn. From there you can ride cargo passage with the corsairs to Prophecy or Xhule.
"If you go to Xhule, find Daybreak Street. There's a knife shop there called Short Cuts. Cover those distort knobs on your head and buy two bluesteel cork-grip stilettos and offer to pay for them with a bag of sassafras. The merchant works for the Rangers. He provides cover without question. Get status papers from him—green card worker papers. Make sure they're blank. You can use them to fend off search patrols. And don't be tempted to pick up a white card or a diplomat disc.
"Leave Xhule that night. Remember faces and move in circles, westward. Take the folk into the riverain forests beyond Hickman. Distort tribes rule that area. Most call themselves Ulac. They believe in Paseq the Divider, and they will give our folk a respected place in their world. Am I clear?"
Sumner glanced at the old man and saw that his face was shining. "Lotus Face," the old one said, "we will not forget you."
"Forget me. I'm as luckless as pain. Go ahead now—"
Sumner walked over to Culler and put a heavy arm on his shoulders. "Tell our Masseboth warriors to let these folk go. When they're a day's hike from here, I'll give you back your gun and you can kill me."