Radix, page 21
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
***
On Sumner’s last night in Dhalpur, he rubbed himself down with water-thinned mud and blue moss to keep away insects, and he entered the swamp. An owl, silent as a fish, sailed overhead, and the wind shifted, murmuring in the trees like water.
Mauschel waited for him in a small flatboat hung with red fishskin-lanterns. Wreaths of linaloa incense rose from the corners of the flatboat. Far down the river, heat lightning quivered, and a breeze smelling of distance dispelled the closeness of the mud-rot air.
“You’ve done well,” Mauschel greeted. In the red light, his legless, twisted body looked like a wooden idol.
Sumner stood quietly before him, knowing with the meat of his body as well as with the memories of endless hours he had spent in selfscan before this man that he had accomplished nothing—he had simply become himself.
Mauschel grinned at him like a sunstruck ape. “Come here, you self-conscious buffoon.”
Sumner stepped forward, and Mauschel grabbed his legs and held him tight. “You’re right,” the old man whispered. “You’re not to be saved. No one is. But today you’re leaving here a ranger, and I’d be less than lizard-grease if I didn’t tell you I’m proud.” He knocked on the hull of his boat, and Sumner sat down. “Here—you earned this a long time ago, but I couldn’t give it to you until you didn’t need it.”
He pressed a small piece of metal into Sumner’s hand: a silver cobra pin—the Ranger insignia.
“We’ve spent three years sharing nothing but what’s around us,” Mauschel said. He sat back, and darkness leaned into his eyes. “Now I feel I can tell you about deeper things. But I won’t. You already know that it doesn’t matter one whit what you do. It all comes to the same thing. And you’ve found out, it seems, that you’re bigger than you think. Remember when you thought it was impossible to empty your mind and keep your body moving?”
He laughed softly and cast Sumner a sly look. “You understand, too, that eternity’s between us. Each of us moves alone through his own meaning, creating value as he goes. You know that, though you haven’t had the time to ponder it, and I hope you never do. But there’s one thing you may not have realized just yet. It’s the last mystery.”
He leveled his swordmaster’s gaze directly into Sumner’s eyes. “The Rangers own you.” He paused and stared down at his blunt, callus-sheathed hands. “For three years, you’ve lived rigorously but alone. It’s going to be different in the Rangers. They’re a political tool, you know, commanded by the Massebôth Black Pillar, who have world-shaping plans, historical dreams—iguana-dung, all of it. So, if you think there’s more than nonsense to our lives, you’d better get out while you can. Go north into the wilderness. You know enough to survive anywhere now.”
He ran a yellow thumbnail along a crease of scar that followed his jaw, and his eyes thinned. “But if you understand, as I think you do, that nonsense is all there is, then stay with the Rangers. They treat their own well. You’ll earn your livelihood as a killer, but who’s to say that’s any worse than a physician for all we come to, eh? Just keep one thing in the front of your mind when you deal with moral twits or mystics who think they’ve seen into the heart of things: The one secret is that all things are secret.”
***
Sumner’s first assignments took him into the ruins of Apis and Longstorm. Both cities had once been major seaports, centuries old. Fifty years before, they had been crushed by a savage raga storm, and the Massebôth, lacking the resources to rebuild, deserted them. Leagues and leagues of collapsed buildings, dune-drifted boulevards, and skeletal frames rose out of steamy lagoons, all of it surrendered to distort gangs and the jungle.
Sumner arrived in these ghost cities to stalk distort leaders who had become too influential. The work, arduous and cruel, would recompense Sumner well. The Club Foot, Prophecy’s most famous bordello, maintained for him a perennial open door without charge, and he spent most of his leave-time there. Seeing himself clearly in the mirror-chambers, surrounded by servants and fine foods, he harbored surprise at what he had become.
Without the mud and swamp grease of Dhalpur and with his sun-reddened hair braided to one side in the latest fashion, Sumner appeared a celestial demon. His face, flat as a blade, scars eroded to pale artistic etchings by wind and time, and wide, silent eyes blue as spun steel, he faced the world with a cryptic mask. He stood tall, almost a giant, shoulders stooped with power. Big-boned, muscles thick yet pliant, skin burnished the color of dawn, with tight copper-red curls boiling over his chest, he existed as a rare animal.
The women of The Club Foot worshipped him as an avatar of the god Rut, and they fought each other to be with him—for not only did he qualify as the most relentlessly masculine creature they had known, he was also as ingenious as a magician. His lean, patient hands, barked with callus and taut with strength, could caress womanflesh with petal-soft tenderness, fingers moving with a delicate and sometimes fierce cunning.
Women, however, occupied only a small part of Sumner’s life. They pleasured him, but they could not fulfill him. Only the wild spaces, empty of emotion and full of deception, engaged him totally.
If it weren’t for the decay of the ruins that the Massebôth had assigned him to patrol, he would have been happy. But Apis and Longstorm opened into chancrous landscapes. Often when perched on a twisted girder enveloped in the acrid dampness of dissolving concrete or when prowling the squalid beaches of wrecked cars and frothy chemical pools, he wondered why the Massebôth had come to this.
In time, it became obvious to him, as to everyone else, that the government was corrupt. Whispers of political intrigue reached not only the underprivileged but the highest military circles as well. Sumner served for more than a month as the personal bodyguard of a prominent and greatly admired general. During that time, they shared meals and broke up the tedious hours of traveling between frontier posts by playing kili and talking.
The general, a humanitarian with plans for abolishing dorga pits and for establishing self-sufficient distort colonies, smoked only the cheapest cigars and ate and traveled humbly so that he could save money to realize his dreams. Deeply impressed by the general’s sincere commitment and parsimonious way of life, Sumner listened with real interest to the soldier’s political insights.
The general explained how for centuries a handful of families had run the Massebôth government for their own personal aggrandizement. They employed the Unnatural Creatures Edict not only to eliminate voors and distorts but also to remove suspected political competitors. They forbade newspapers from assessing government policy, and they carefully monitored university courses in history and society. But in their eagerness to consolidate power, they failed to provide the Protectorate with decisive and objective leadership.
Within the last century, half the fringe colonies with all their vast agricultural resources had been lost to raga storms and distort tribes. Expansion and exploration had become minimal. The workers in the dorga pits, increasingly essential to maintain city life, required strict control, and so even minor offenders suffered branding with drone straps. Taxes had quadrupled in only a few years, and most guilds and factory chiefs had to lay off workers and forestall wage increases. To quiet dissension, the military fulfilled more police work and less defensive maneuvers along the borders. As a result, distort gangs and tribes proliferated and drew closer to the core cities. Disgruntled guildsmen and fractious government officials even sold arms to the distort gangs for material looted from the convoys.
The avarice of his leaders disturbed Sumner, but he did not allow that to affect his work. It wasn’t loyalty to the Massebôth or the Rangers that kept him active and unquestioning; rather it was devotion to himself. He had been remade in the image of a ranger. There was nothing else for him.
And so, a year later, when called back from Apis to assassinate the general, he did not balk. Obliged by a sense of comradeship, he refrained from humiliating the military leader and refused the easy strategy of gunning him down in public. Instead, at great risk to himself, he approached the general at night, slithering through a hypnosis of barbed wire and trip lines surrounding his bivouac. It took all of his skill to merge with the moonshadows, to crawl beneath the heat-addled air of the main court and to shadow past the alert stares of well-armed guards. Finally, he advanced with a sultry breeze stirring the gauze curtains of the central building. Among the stupor of shadows that veiled the general’s chamber, he trailed the moist scent of sleep to a canopied bed. After deftly and painlessly slicing the general’s carotid with a poisoned fingerazor, he merged again with the shadows.
The general’s death bothered him for a while, because he had sensed that the man had been sincere. In the same way that he knew when others secretly watched him or when and how an enemy was about to strike, he had known that the general had told him the truth. The Massebôth were evil and their empire decaying.
Sumner felt neither outrage nor despair about this fact. Even though he served the Protectorate, he did not consider himself a Massebôth. He was a ranger, and he devoted all his mental and physical energies to perfecting his craft. The doom of the cities was not his concern. After all, what wasn’t doomed? The only control he had was over himself, and even that was limited, for he constantly surprised himself.
One dismal rain-misted night in Vortex, with nothing better to do, he followed the tug of elusive animal psynergies and found himself wandering through a tangle of stone alleys, his feet muffled in fog. Several hours later, at the end of a tight cobbled lane of antique bookstalls and slot-windowed apothecary shops, he stopped before a salt-split doorstoop. The cramped shopfront was windowless except for a crescent pane bratticed with corroded iron. He had no idea why his instincts had led him to this desolate corner of the city until his persistent knocking summoned an old woman with skin the color of clouded silver, fire-frizzed hair, and blinking bird’s eyes. He faced Zelda. Surprised, but too much of a warrior to express shock, he politely asked for a wangol reading.
Zelda didn’t recognize him, and she stepped back, hesitant to admit this flat-eyed, solar-burned giant into her shop. But he presented a cordial smile, his voice flawlessly affectionate, and besides, he wore a clean, smart-looking uniform and probably had money. Since she had acquired her augur license, she needed zords to meet the tax. She motioned him into her reading room, a dingy chamber with Mutric figurines in the corners, ponderous indigo curtains, and a rotted plank floor so soft with age it sighed the odor of dead leaves with each step. A round black-sheened mirror hung on the wall surrounded by yellowed charts depicting body parts and their various auguries.
Zelda had aged greatly in the intervening years, reduced to a wraith in a brown etamine shift embroidered with starsigns. Sumner watched her closely as she drifted about the tiny room lighting tallow sticks and preparing incense coals. He felt no emotion for her, and as they sat down on bamboo stools before a crumbling corkwood table, he wondered why he had bothered to come in.
She handed him seven painted lentils and told him to cast them. After several throws, she looked up and studied him with eyes bright as pain. “Your history is one of accidents. Deception and error guide you. Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, you will confront someone from your past, possibly a child. But I see no recognition. Only what we know is real. Also, quite soon, you will have to discard everything. But you will adjust, for I see you are a man for whom all destinations are temporary. You change readily, sometimes obscuring your own purposes, though a deep, burning part of you is always the same. That is the paradox of your nature—the cloud and the star.”
Sumner laid all the money he had across the table, and Zelda straightened and stared at him more closely. Before she could recognize him he stood up and, with her profuse gratitude singing in his ears, returned to the night of rain.
Zelda’s pathetic old age affirmed Sumner’s conviction to die young. He had seen old rangers, rheumy-eyed and pale, fading away in noisy government offices or, worse, fumbling in the field and then brutally humiliated by distorts, butchered with their own knives. That would not happen to him.
Sumner took risks most of the other rangers eluded. Death, to him, offered freedom at the crest, escape from the body’s inevitable slide. He feared nothing—not torture or loneliness or the weirdest distorts. How could he fear them? Life was a brief harrowing voided by death, and these were the healings of pain.
***
Sumner sat on a pierhead gnawing at a whole orange. On the dirty beach around him, scrawny pigs and dogs scavenged among loosely bundled bales of garbage.
He finished his orange, wiped his hands on his shorts, and stood up. Seabirds poised on tall, lilting fish-spears turned their heads to watch him as he ambled down the ruined beach. Today would be his last day in the hamlet of Laguna. The man he had been assigned to kill had arrived the night before. Actually, his victim was not a man at all but a voor called Dai Bodatta.
For over a month, Sumner had been waiting for this voor, living unobtrusively in one of the blue pastel shanties across the bay. The fisherman’s widow who rented him the place had no doubt that he was anything more than the dockworker he claimed to be. Like the other stevedores, he wore soiled canvas-top shoes, remnant shorts, and an oil-stained singlet. And like them, he worked a dawn-to-dusk shift, loading barges with crates of rice and scraping and painting hulls—until today.
He walked out to the middle of the windward shore where the bay washed over a pink bench of coral. The tide rushed in, and white feathers and dragontails of spray lashed with the sea boom.
Here at the far end of Laguna Bay, another harbor had once flourished. Plague had doomed that village many years before, and now only blackened stumps of old pilings, a few charred boat ribs, and a storm-staggered jetty remained. The villagers thought this crescent of land that separated them from the sea was haunted, and they used it as a dump. Sumner knew that he would confront the voors here.
He sat down on a chunk of driftwood tangled in beach vine and cupped a hand against the late morning light to see the island better. Situated in the middle of the bay, a small, tree-crowded knob of stone stood. No sign of voors appeared among the tiers of sea pine, but Sumner knew they waited there. Last night, hundreds of voors had crossed the bay in black-hulled rigs.
Alerted at dusk by a mirrorflash from a ranger farther down the coast, Sumner had sat up all night watching the voors arrive. The night-lens he had used revealed the cowled figures in the boats. From the side of the island facing away from Laguna, blue and green fires flickered for a few hours. Then they vanished, and by dawn nothing remained of the voors—except for the dreams. Most of the hamlet woke groggy from a night of restless, moody dreaming.
Voors did not often show up this far south, but over the past few years they had been gathering annually in different coves and bays of the region. No one knew why the voors came, but each year their number grew, and lately the Massebôth had become concerned. Word of a new leader of the voors spread through the northern coast cities with wild rumors of a voor invasion. And though hardly anyone there had ever seen a voor and known it, fear mounted. Travelers mistaken for voors were viciously murdered, and distorts who had long been ignored got herded together and drowned. To ease the situation, the Massebôth decided to eliminate the one voor who had been leading the others south. Unfortunately, they knew nothing more than the name of that voor—Dai Bodatta.
Sumner felt glad the voors had come to his bay. A month of inactivity had made him restless. With one hand, he dug a hole in the sand behind the driftwood and extracted an oilcloth satchel. Inside the sack, he carried an electric-pump handgun, a rifle extension, half a dozen clips, a night/day lens, and numerous slabs of gel explosives. He removed the handgun, wiped it clean of grease, and fitted a clip into it. Checking the alignment of the sights, he turned to follow a gull sliding out over the bay, and his sweaty singlet sucked at his back. The bay water beyond the coral ridge gleamed jade-green and clear as an eye.
Sumner peered through the lens and observed movement on the shore of the island. Voors in gray and brown mantles assembled, hauling small boats out from behind stands of sea pines. Hair crested by the wind, he stood tall and swept the bay with the lens, looking for other ships. There were none. The morning shift had already moored, and the afternoon fleet crowded the bay mouth, waiting to get out to sea.
Quickly, Sumner stooped and removed the thin slabs of gel explosives; then, he reached into the sand below the driftwood and took out a small square tin of firing caps. Excitement throbbed in his chest, and he had to raise the lens again to ascertain that the voors intended to cross. In broad daylight, he marveled, watching the small boats splash into the water.
He doublechecked his rifle and the firing caps, and then he sat down. Time again for selfscan: full attention on the stalled shadows—noon, the turning point.
***
Black the blood and the bones...
Tala squinted into the noon glare buzzing off the water and waited for her eyes to adjust. Clochan and the others dragged the ships out from behind the trees, which meant that they had already probed the far shore for howlies. Still, she scanned slowly. Pale sketches of coral glowed beneath the green water. A shark glided near the reef, turning swiftly with powerful strokes of its huge caudal. Farther out, silver sparks flurried in the sunlight where minnows chopped the surface. And on the far bank: tilted red mangroves, black palm fronds, and white sand littered with howlie debris and torn sargassum. No howlies—though she felt something evil and elusive. She tried to concentrate, but her drowsy body, cold with lethargy, could not focus beyond herself very well.
