Radix, page 22
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Clochan waved from where he stood, knee-deep in kelp-drench. The cold within her flushed warmer, and the loose end of a voice rose out of the back of her mind: Bring out the stonelights.
Tala nodded. But, before turning, she stared hard across the bay again. The jittery trees stared back empty. She dismissed her fear with a hiss and walked back through the pines to a cave of overhanging trees. Chanting voices from far within melled with the hum of wind-stirred leaves and the incoming tide, sounding like the mumble of a dream. Her eyes adjusted rapidly to the darkness, and she moved nimbly through red shadows to a rim-crusted incline that swooped steeply out of sight. Here the chanting opened very clearly: Black the blood and the bones beneath the skin. Black the earth one finger under. Black the emptiness bent over time.
Tala would go no farther. Dai Bodatta waited down there, and she knew that if she were with him again in the planet-warmth she would leave her salt for sure. Her darktime had gotten very bad in the last year. All of her flesh had stiffened, and living had become a labor. Only her devotion to the brood kept her from crossing over to Iz. The brood needed her deep mind, especially when the stonelight journey took them so close to howlies.
The chanting thinned to a hum. The rhythm of a slade-drum drew closer, and figures appeared below. Single file, a dozen voors emerged from the darkness, cowls thrown back. A few of them bore marks: frosted eyes, squamous lips, vein-netted transparent skin. But most of them looked clean. The several hundred voors that had arrived with them had been long into their darktime and all had crossed over. Their bodies had been rafted and set adrift on a broad subterranean stream that wandered far into the earth.
As each of the remaining voors passed her, they placed two or three brood jewels in a wattled basket at her feet. With her kiutl-sharpened senses, she briefly inspected each stonelight. The size of plums, clear-grained and glimmer-wobbling with lustrous colors, some fiery and translucent, others gold-banded and misty as the gas planets, the stones held light centuries old, the trapped kha of voors that seeded these cave walls with tiny pieces of their lives—relic light moving its ancient telling through clear stone.
After the last of the stonelights had been placed in the basket and the container covered, tied, and passed out of the cave, two of the voors went back down the incline. They reemerged slowly, carrying Dai Bodatta, a small figure in a sheath of camlet trimmed with miniver. The bearers stopped before Tala, and she folded aside the covering and moved her gaze slowly over the black childshape within. A blue light hazed like fungus over the rough surface of the cocoon, and as she stared at it the sleepy solitude of her darktime thickened, and she heard a voice, soft as a cloud, far back in her mind: Lose the way.
She straightened with surprise and then relaxed, soft-focusing her awareness, listening for the voice of the child-image. But Dai Bodatta kept silent.
She folded the opulent covering over the cocoon and watched after it as the two voors walked out through the cave mouth. She stood a moment in the dark, staring at the sky’s arch: cloudswift, a gull turning on one wing, and farther out, the long silence of a wedge of birds. Thoughts nimble as static flurried across her mind: The crossing of the darktime voors should have been done elsewhere. Not this close to howlies. But why had Dai Bodatta insisted?
Tala—it’s time. A tall voor, angular and shriven, stood at the cavemouth, cowl pulled back—Clochan, his flesh pale as moonlight.
A visceral, ungelded joy spiked through her. She loved this voor, fluent with both feelings and thoughts, a leader and, for her, a lover. Before, when they stood close, contemplating the deep heart of a jewel, he had filled her with such blue-bliss that for a while she had forgotten their danger and had become a broodling again, unaware of bloodpaths or the darktime. His words still moved in her: “Three hundred years from now, someone in this cave will pick up our stonelights and know that we lived.”
Let’s go, Clochan called to her. We have to ride the tide.
“Soon.” The sound of her voice throbbing in the dark hull of the cave startled her.
“You feel troubled?” Clochan whispered, stepping closer. His sunken eyes shimmered, watery with reflected light.
Tala discarded her feelings with a shrug of her hands. “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to think clearly.”
Clochan put his arm around her, and she felt as light as when the full moon pulled at her blood. Today belongs to few, Clochan quoted.
“Too few,” she echoed.
“The others sense no one across the bay. We have to hurry, while the way is still clear.”
Lose the way, the mage’s voice recurred, but she did not project it. “I’m ready,” she said.
Afternoon sunlight, clear as wine, shafted between the trees. Tala absently followed Clochan, pondering what Dai Bodatta had said. Lose the way—Give up the body? Yes, the mage is right. Her bloodpaths had narrowed, leaving her cold. Pain turned in her belly like the children she never had. Her body felt alien. Strange how these warmbloods were shaped to believe they’re the exact center. Ears, eyes—all their senses—conspire to make them feel whole—replete. No wonder they’re so arrogant.
A red seedcase flitted above the turf in a gusty seabreeze, and Tala watched closely as it sailed out over the water. It had come a long way from the north and was going a long way. An Iz-sign: all life carried off by a wind that goes its own way and can never turn back.
***
The voors scudded in three skiffs, sliding swiftly along the tidal current among streamers of bright brown sargassum weed and sparkles of leaping needlefish. In the lead rig, Clochan knelt at the prow, surveying the bay. No other ships were in sight, and the tree-heavy isle behind them blocked the three boats from view of Laguna.
Riding in the end rig, with the camlet-wrapped cocoon, Tala watched the approaching delta. Dai Bodatta stayed silent, furled deep, and the only sound hissed from the boat slicing across the water. Tala gazed in soft focus at the approaching wall of mangroves, stumps of twisted trees, and dunes of garbage. Gulls ringing over the refuse piles told her no howlies occupied the beach, but a chime had begun to peal in her left ear. Always before, that had signaled danger; now, though, she wasn’t sure. The darktime often filled her head with whorls of sound.
Clochan used deep mind and hand signals to guide the following skiffs through the barrier of coral heads and spikes. The churning reefwater frothed behind them, and the lead boat ran in to the beach with a loud cough. Clochan and the others splashed into the shallows and carried the flyweight rig to shore. By the time the second rig slashed in, they were back in the water, lifting the wattled basket of brood jewels over their heads.
Copra husks and mangrove radicles tangled around their legs in the milky shallows. Eight voors steadied the third rig as others gently lifted Dai Bodatta and carried him to shore. They beached the prow and left the stern tilting and luffing in the water.
Dai Bodatta held to silence, and this concerned Tala. She placed a hand beneath the cloth covering and felt the dry textured surface of the cocoon. A cold energy sang along her fingers, and a quiet voice opened within her: Lose the way.
Clochan and two others carried the first rig over the sand toward a gap in the mangroves. Four others lifted the second rig with the stonelights in it and, kicking tins and sand-clotted fruit out of their way, followed. Three went back to portage the third skiff, and Tala tightened the sheath about the mage and supervised his handling by the two remaining voors. Then, as they stepped forward, the sand shifted beneath their feet, and the beach ahead of them roared into the sky.
An impact of heat and tearing pressure slammed Tala to the ground. Debris thudded around her, and she covered her head as another explosion screamed out of the trees. Palm fronds and a stinging rain of sand lashed her back, and she rolled toward the water. When she looked up, the beach swarmed with smoke, and the seven voors and two rigs that had been ahead of her had vanished.
Looking closely, she gagged, choked by rage and terror: Lopped limbs in smoking sleeyes splayed among the garbage, blue-gray entrails glistened on the white sand, and the moon-white face of Clochan stared back from a blood pool with the startled somnolence of the dead.
“Dai Bodatta!” a voor screamed and leaped toward where the cocoon had been hurled by the blasts. He took another step, and his head snapped back, one eye a mangled rose. Two other voors scrambled over the smoldering debris trying to recover the stonelights scattered across the beach. One went down with a plume of blood at the back of her head, and the other dropped as if he had stumbled. The kha of both of them smoked away from their bodies before they hit the ground.
Tala turtled across the sand, scurrying toward the cocoon, which had been thrown against a rust-gutted oil drum. She threw her body alongside it, tore back the camlet sheath, relieved to find it intact.
The three voors who had gone back to the third rig sprinted toward her, and she howled at them with deep mind to get down. One of them lurched backward and flopped to the sand, blood spurting from her neck. A second one reached out to help, suddenly straightened, twisted violently, and collapsed. The third bellycrawled toward a driftwood log, thrashed in the sand for an instant, and then stopped moving.
Terror swamped her, and she felt herself wrinkling weaker. What is happening? Her fear-charged mind sensed no one anywhere nearby.
Lose the way—
She craned her neck and saw that everyone lay dead. Their kha lights had wisped away so quickly! A severed hand laced with blood reposed ahead of her in the filth-strewn sand. She looked away and watched a huge man in rags stepping out of the mangrove shadows. His kha shone very close to his body, solar gold and radiant, and his face, flat and cruel with scars, showed no emotion. He loped toward her with a silver rifle in his hands, and her heart wobbled. He moved silent as smoke, a revenant.
Lose the way—
Dai Bodatta’s presence alone kept her from going mad. She touched its cold surface, and the psynergy that sparkled through her dissolved her terror. The light around her brightened, became glassy. A diaphanous white brilliance suffused everything, and she realized that she could cross into Iz. But who would protect Dai Bodatta? Who would save—
Lose the way!
Implacable radiance burst through her thoughts, and her mind spasmed: She gazed at a lava-flow of forge-red light webbing to a furious white energy—a delirious sun, all starfire and refulgence.
The trembling wails and buckled screams of the voor dead dazed and pummeled her until a voice like a stammering flame shadowed closer: Three hundred years from now, someone will find our stonelights and know that we lived.
Clochan’s voice, thinning into distance like a struck bell...
Joy and then anger sheared her numbness. Immediately, the wind of tormented voices smeared and vanished, and she waited alone again in the starwhite energy.
Lose the way—forget the body’s loneliness, the mage’s voice spoke within her. And she understood that the time had come to stop understanding. The arduous journey along the bloodpaths was finished. A powerful, sultry wind leafed through her awareness, scattering memories beyond her reach. The broad, warm current buoyed her across spans of crystalbright gas, weaning her away from pain and distance and thought.
***
Sumner pumped a bullet into the voor crouching behind a rusted oil drum. Dai Bodatta? he wondered, stooping over the drum and pulling back the voor’s cowl.
His teeth meshed tightly as he stared at the grotesque creature he had killed: a slobbery thing, its flesh a glossy blue-white, veined like moldy cheese, mouth a bubbling mess. He heaved it over with his foot and peered at the bundle the thing had been protecting.
A bewildered frown darkened his face. With the muzzle of his rifle, he pulled back the camlet covering and eyed the childshape. A statue? No. He poked the black woven surface and realized he had exposed a mummified child—a voor abomination.
Casually, he placed the rifle barrel between the mummy’s eyes and pulled the trigger.
The cocoon splattered apart, and a burst of hot ichor spurted into his face, kicking him to the ground. He thrashed in the sand, both hands to his face, a terrible pain stabbing his flesh. A stink his blood remembered from years before invaded his throat and sinuses and bleared his eyes. The lusk psiberant! Liquid fire seared his face and the hollows of his head, ripping maniacal howls from his lungs.
Spastically, he churned in the sand, trying to get to his feet, but his muscles quaked with the poison burning through his body. Helpless, beyond thought, Sumner blanked his mind and let the agony consume him. His body strained and heaved, twisting him deeper into the sand with ogreish convulsions. He writhed for hours, gulfed in pain, before the spasms slackened and he accepted that he wasn’t going to die.
His face, swollen and fluffy with peeling skin, had gone numb by the time his limbs had calmed enough for him to stand. The air looked fractured. Light seemed chalky, and the cocoon that had exploded in his face had disappeared, shriveled to a slick, colorless smudge beside the elegant cloth that had sheathed it.
Invisible forces shuddered space, warping it like an old, bottom-heavy pane of glass. Distances faltered, curled around themselves, and time staggered. The long swells of the ebbing tide swam to shore slow as elegant swans.
Most terrible of all, a voice chattered in his head. He rubbed his temples and rocked himself, trying to shake the noise loose, but the dim, unintelligible chanting persisted. He horribly recalled the same horrible mumbling, cooing, clicking rhythm that Jeanlu’s corpse had tormented him with years before. It ricocheted across the back of his skull, dull and wrung out, just audible above the anguish ballooning through his lungs.
He lurched across the sand, wanting to run, but time snared and space had gotten bruised and distorted, volume folding like paper. Each of his steps swung him out across immense ranges of distance, while the entire length of the delta hung before him thin as a reflection.
***
A dragonish twilight stalked the eastern sky, a windy dusk, clouds low and running. A black-sailed catboat rolling heavily in the dark chop swung hard to shore. Eight wild men with braided hair and eyes burned red by pulque and sun stood at the taffrail. They, like everyone in Laguna, had wondered at the explosions on the dump delta. At first, they waited, too wary to approach, but after receiving smoke signals that two rangers were on their way, they decided to explore the dump first.
After weighing their boat with a coral-head anchor, all eight waded ashore. The twisted corpses alarmed them, but the sight of the brood jewels scattered like constellations on the beach lured them closer. They scrambled to gather the hoard and were on their knees in the sand when they spotted the madman. Half naked and tall as a pine, face a mask of charred flesh, he came raging at them out of the mangrove darkness, screaming like a rabid ape. One of the men had a gun. He held it in both hands as he sighted and dropped the lune with the first shot.
Startled, the corsairs gathered the brood jewels in one sack and decided to divide them later by lot. All of them knew, however, that death would be casting dice with them for this odd number of jewels. Hoping to even out their booty, they plundered the corpses.
Intent on their scavenging, they did not see Sumner, his bullet-creased shoulder clotted with blood and sand, rearing up from the garbage pit he had fallen into. With a battered oar in his hands, he reeled out of the pit and dashed toward the man who had shot him. Before anyone could move, he swung out with the oar and caught the gunman full in the face, smashing him to a limp sprawl.
The others rallied instantly, flashing knives and turtle-razors. Sumner came at them, unstoppable. He shattered heads with sweeps of the oar, slammed faces into driftwood, and clubbed his way to stillness with the loose bodies of those that had fallen. When none stood against him, he couldn’t stop the horrible dancing, the racking strength that forced him to smash again and again the bloodrags of those he had killed until he felt he was going beyond his body, and he banged to his knees, exhausted with rage.
Far back in his thundering mind, the mad chattering narrowed, and a whispered cadence began: Black the blood and the bones...
The Emptying
A lionfaced man stood on the roof of a flower-crowned tower, his yellow eyes cold with fatigue. A distort, he was not unattractive. Golden hair grew the tall length of his spine and glistened like fur on his arms and legs. His features glowed with sapient geniality, and his movements as he crossed the circular rooftop, long and regal, flowed from his identity as a breeder who had just come from a full night among the females. Beneath the red soft-fabric wrap that he wore, his thick muscles sang with weariness. He leaned on the blossom-strung balustrade and gazed out over his village.
He alone bore the privilege, as the most whole distort of his tribe, to stand atop the breeding stables and survey Miramol. The village flourished, beautiful with life, built in a grove of baobab trees and mist springs. Eastward, the jungle withered to a desert where skyfires, the dreams of all living things, still burned. Below, workers with green dawn-lanterns scurried among the round huts of Miramol, preparing the village for another day. And in the west, the direction all doors faced but those of the dead huts, the sun untangled from the roots of the jungle.
The whorl is in all things, the breeder marveled.
A worshiper’s call echoed into the sky. Several answering cries sparked out of the stables from restless females, and the breeder turned and barked once into the musky darkness of the doorway to still their irreverence.
He would be happy when the Mothers passed on his duties to a younger, more driven male. He had been a breeder for over a decade, and he had grown too rapt and contemplative for life in the stables. Still, finding someone as responsible as he among the sex-crazed young males would be difficult. No doubt he would have to serve for at least another cycle.
The heavy carnal odors clouding out of the stable fluttered his stomach. He pulled aside his loincloth and urinated into the dark gardens below. The very thought of sex made his kneecaps turn watery. Tired of rutting, tired of ministering to so many excitable females, he wanted nothing more than to be alone. But he knew that by day’s end he would be feeling differently. The whorl is in all things, all right.
