Radix, page 24
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“But how can the Serbota survive without you?” Ardent Fang growled. “You have guided us for centuries!”
“The né are wise, and the yawps will help you. But let us not talk about this anymore.”
“Magnar—”
“No more!” Bonescrolls’ voice delivered a blow, his face tight as a fist. Then he sat back, eyes crescents of laughter. “And call me Bonescrolls.”
***
At dawn the next day, Ardent Fang and Drift returned to the golden desert. But instead of following the lines of force back the way they had come, they wandered out toward the palatial mesaland, purple in the early light. The sand whispered beneath their feet, and in Drift’s mind the sound became the disapproving sighs of the old man in the rock tower behind them.
Heat encircled them like a sphere of glass, curving vision and sound. Ardent Fang hummed with joy, awed by the beauty of the sandshapes and their soft sere tones. Drift chanted quietly about the sun following two warriors across an endless desert.
***
Sumner was trapped in selfscan. Far back in his mind, dim but always there, the cooing, clicking, snapping noise of a prehistoric insect continued. Sometimes, it tightened to a tiny wringing scream. Other times, it merely breathed a deep, low hum from the core of his heart. But it persisted, and if he budged from selfscan—if he so much as congratulated or berated himself—a long icy needle pithed the root of his skull.
Silence. Animal awareness.
He traversed death’s land-Skylonda Aptos—a million hectares of scabid desert. Sumner could not think it, but he knew that he had come here to die. Not with a brain-splattering bullet between his eyes—the Rangers had taken away his guns. Even if they hadn’t, he would not have done it that way. He was still a ranger. He wore his cobra insignia and his buff regimentals, smudged and frayed now but whole. He would wear them until the land killed him.
Numb-edged from so many hours of walking, his whole body craved pause, and he sat with his back to a rock turret, mindless of the desert insects. He closed his eyes and focused on the sun’s weight against his legs. He tried to relax without dozing off. He did not want to sleep. Not yet. Not until dark.
The snarling voltage bristling at the base of his skull sizzled louder in his ears: a muffled voorchant, like the impossible language Jeanlu’s corpse had chattered in his face so long ago.
Trapped in selfscan, he had not been able to think through his predicament. Still, he understood that a voor had invaded his body. Lusk—the voors called it that.
The whining folded into a staccato chant: black—black—black—
After the incident in Laguna, Sumner had been kept under close observation. The Rangers had no idea what had happened to their man, but any wound inflicted by voors did not bode well. The physicians gave up on him. The face burn looked like nothing they had ever seen. And as for the haunting noises he claimed to hear, what could they do? There was no cure for madness.
Soon it had become obvious that the voors had seriously impaired Sumner. Not only had he been reduced to the level of animal sentience, but in his sleep he rose from his cot and walked circles. Unable to carry out the normal functions of a ranger, the Black Pillar stripped him of all weapons but his knife and sent him north to monitor tribal activities.
For a while, Sumner had complied, meandering along the borders of a riverain forest, secretly peering through grease fires at jumbled frond-huts and the grotesquely misshapen bodies of distorts. But with his mind a holocaust of lunatic sounds, he woke each dawn in a place he had not selected during the night. Terrified he might get ambushed and humiliated by distorts during his mindless nightwalks, he had sought out the deadness of Skylonda Aptos. If he was going to die, he would go out with anonymous dignity.
***
Sumner’s thin downward-slanting eyes flicked open. What stared out of them was not human. Lizard shapes of fire flashed across the space behind those eyes, and globes of eerie sounds burst and reformed. Corby struggled to concentrate. The scene floating on his retinas wavered: sun-hot stone and sky the color of metal. He had difficulty fitting himself into that scene. Iz raged within him, threatening to sweep him away, far out of the body, far out of time.
No! Corby marshaled all his strength. Come to center and extent!
The noises coalesced to frantic jabbering, then narrowed to babble. The vibrant light of Iz patterned itself into a cellular mosaic. The flesh gradually accepted him.
Clumsily, he stood Sumner’s body up—his body now, for the lusk was almost complete. For years, locked shapelessly in a cocoon, carried from brood to brood by the voors, he had used his psynergy to Iz—call for Sumner. And Iz had answered him by leading Sumner to Laguna. Too many voors had died that day on the beach. He would have to redeem their deaths by using this body well.
Corby tottered and placed a hand on the pink rock turret to steady himself. Erumpent noises still clouded his hearing: the crackling, insane current of Iz, rushing through him, threatening to prize apart his world.
Iz-the windy continuum of psynergy that his people rode between realities. Without his own body to anchor him in time, it would be almost impossible to resist the tow of that power.
In the dark cupola of his mind, he sensed Sumner’s thought forms: an oil-still pond with ghostly shapes turning below the surface. Sumner, though enraged, remained locked in selfscan. Like a virus, Corby had permeated Sumner’s nervous system, immobilizing his mind, leaving him unable to think without the reverberations of Iz paralyzing him. Corby could have dampened the Iz-noise, but then his control over Sumner would also weaken—and he needed complete control of this howlie body.
Corby moved out over the red gravel, weaving and staggering. His heart pounded turgidly, and his vision soared as his head lolled from side to side. He insisted on control and sidled along a huge ribbon of rock, trying to straighten his walk. Bare, bony plains with only a whisper of grass appeared at the edge of his sight, and he turned himself in that direction.
He was being hunted. As dulled as his deep-mind had become in this new body, he retained awareness of others closing in on him. Two had bodies, and one shapeshifted. So far, he had had no trouble evading them, though he was concerned. Who were they? What did they want from him?
He stumbled and fell to the ground in a splash of sand and dust. Quickly but awkwardly, he twisted to his feet, staggered forward, and regained his pace.
Only after he had learned to use this body, he had decided, would he risk communicating with Sumner. Then, even if his father disagreed with his plans, he would have a slim chance of carrying them out himself.
His father—
Odd that this adult had so much in common with his old childform. It would have been interesting to watch his own body developing. But Nefandi had betrayed him. Now the most he could hope for was to eliminate the proven enemies of his people. Nefandi and the godmind called the Delph—sooner or later, he would confront both of them with this new killing-wise body.
He slid on his heels down the slope of a scarlet dune, exultant in his freedom. Holding his head straight, vision stammering in his eyes, he strode purposefully forward. The effort to maintain control thinned his will. Time—it would take time.
He stopped beside a boulder and sat back against it. The cells of his body sang, and he listened closely...
***
Sumner shrugged awake and groaned to see where he was. A wind, thin and persistent as a rumor, had already begun to smear his tracks. Vaguely, he recalled a dream full of weird sounds. He rubbed his face and stood up, shivering in the tawny heat.
***
“Do you believe the whorl is in all things?” Ardent Fang asked, cutting open a cactus with his obsidian knife.
The né whistled, dull and low, and its soft voice spoke inside the tribesman’s head: More nonsense from the Mothers?
“Nonsense?” Ardent Fang spoke without looking at Drift: “You say that because you’re né.”
I say that because it’s true. Nonsense is all that the Mothers have to offer.
They paused to chew the sweetness out of the cactus, Drift expressionless, Ardent Fang squinting his yellow eyes with pleasure. Done, the tribesman spit the cactus pulp into the sand. “Né—do you believe the whorl is in all things?”
Drift shutter-blinked like a lizard. What is the whorl?
“The turning, the return,” Ardent Fang answered. “What is full becomes empty, empty full. Like breathing.”
Cycles? In all things?
“Yes.”
Drift spit cactus pulp over its shoulder and spoke with its voice at the back of its throat, chewed almost to a garble: “I-am-né. Will-I-ever-be-gendered?”
The dark blade hissed as Ardent Fang sheathed it. “It’s said we return—each time different.”
Nonsense.
“It’s said.”
You mean, the Mothers have told you.
Ardent Fang frowned, blunt features narrow as a wolf’s. “The Mothers would know.”
Pizzle rind.
“How then, né, do they know which of us to breed?”
They don’t.
A tic screamed silently at the corner of Ardent Fang’s mouth.
Drift splashed his bony hands in front of him, shrugging. The Mothers breed the ones that look the strongest. The truly exceptional ones, usually those with the most face, are chosen as leaders—like yourself. But the Mothers don’t know any more than anybody with eyes.
A thin, knowing smile floated across Ardent Fang’s lips. “There are mother-mysteries, né, revealed only to a few.”
No, breeder. There’s just dying. Drift’s waterdrop eyes did not blink. No mysteries. No whorl.
Ardent Fang stared at the seer as if looking a long way out to sea. He slapped his knees and stood up. “It’s late,” he announced. “We should find a place and send.”
Drift watched him scout about for hidden cacti, and it felt a twinge of remorse at having challenged this man’s simple beliefs. Ardent Fang was a good leader, just and sympathetic to folk and né. His faith came with his openness. The seer looked inward and shouted at himself, No more foisting hatred of the Mothers onto friends. It stood up and went around to the far end of the rock lip pool, where the water was unsullied by their earlier frolicking. Bending for a last sip, the seer eyed swamp-puma prints in the silt, fresh as black petals. Fang!
Ardent Fang tramped over and studied the tracks. “Under two hours. Bonescrolls?”
It must be, Drift thought, and Ardent Fang felt its respect. I don’t sense him at all, but why else would a swamp-puma come this deep into the wastes?
A puling cry wavered out of the distance—the lonely, ethereal caterwaul of a huge cat.
Now there are three of us.
“Come on. Let’s find a place before dark.” Ardent Fang marched out through the sun-blown weeds toward a simmering landscape of black buttes and salt domes.
For the past two days, they had wandered the Road from one waterhole to the next, seeking the presence of Bonescrolls’ enemy. By the end of the first day, they had begun to wonder if the stranger was an enemy at all. Drift sensed the man, even though it could not pinpoint him. His mind ranged that empty. He moved silently, and he stayed nearby, haunting the shadowed terrain. He watched them, but he did not act like an enemy. He did not urinate in the waterholes after he drank, and he had left no poison-burrs in the sand, none that they had found yet.
Ardent Fang worried that they had found no spoor: not a footprint or a urine scent. This baffled and unsteadied Ardent Fang. Because he couldn’t feel the tenuous vibrations of the stranger’s salt, not even through Drift, he had begun to doubt his existence. Perhaps they had embarked on one of the magnar’s ploys to test their loyalty or spiritual depth.
He glissaded down a slope of copper sand and mounted a windnotched incline of black rock. At the top he gazed beyond undulant salt domes, across bronze fields of pebbled sand, toward the crater highlands. That would be a good place to test his theory, he figured, since the ash prairies around the craters trapped even dragonfly prints.
***
Ardent Fang strode boldly over the cinder wastes, cutting a straight line of tracks to an arena of brimstone outcrops. Sitting on the hard ground among the knobs of sulfur, Drift felt at ease. The night before, they had slept in the open, and until dawn Drift had lain in a half-stupor, feeling the thin psynergy of the stranger moving across the stone shapes around them. At least here, even though there was nothing to eat, there would be tracks in the morning.
Ardent Fang reached into his hip pouch and removed a devil harp—a dark finger of walnut wood that voors had given him as a young man in barter for food. The use-glossed wood, strung internally, revealed silver wires through the holes in its sides. Ardent Fang put one of those holes to his lips, and a lofty, sparkling corolla of sound warbled around them.
Drift snapped shut its eyes and experienced a pulse of warm human energy somewhere to the west. The stranger continued to dog them.
Long into the night, Ardent Fang played his devil harp, sending his music bouncing across the highlands, sometimes forlorn with vibrant darkenings and rendings, and other times watery, bright as ice, retreating and returning like submerged sounds. Drift followed the echoing vibrations of man-psynergy circling the music, close and then far, until it nodded into sleep.
***
“Drift!” A hard, thick hand squeezed the seer awake, and a hot whisper grazed its ear: “He’s here!”
Drift sat up. Ardent Fang, hunched and still, eyes sliding from side to side, clutched the dog-crucifix strung about his neck. “I heard him clatter on the rocks,” he breathed.
Maybe it was Bonescrolls.
“No, it wasn’t a cat weight or-Look!”
Drift turned in the direction of Ardent Fang’s gaze and caught two firefly eyes beside one of the outcrops before they vanished.
The seer stilled its mind, trying to feel the presence it had just confronted. Nothing: a dawn breeze scuttling over rocks and the distant hiss of steaming grottoes. A detached, precarious feeling expanded in the né, and it trembled to think that what it faced might indeed be an enemy.
“Paseq!” Ardent Fang shouted the sacred name into the misty darkness. “Paseq!”
Shut up! Drift clutched Ardent Fang’s arm. He might think you’re threatening him.
“Spirits can’t stand the Divider’s name,” the tribesman explained, and then shouted again toward where he had seen those sparking eyes: “Paseq!”
It’s not a spirit. Spirits don’t have eyes!
“Paseq!”
The two stared hard after the echoes of Ardent Fang’s cries. A long moment of silence tightened around them. And then, quiet as a shadow, a hulking man curled out from behind a brimstone spar, five paces to the side of where they faced.
Even crouched in sketchy dawnlight, his deep-hulled chest and muscle-cobbled back looked majestic. Thin, flat viper eyes stared blankly from a purple-glazed face—an idol-visage, arched with animal cheekbones and a wide jaw. His gleaming flesh presented a dark rainbow mask.
Ardent Fang staggered back a pace. He growled, but there was a whine in his eyes. Drift knelt, arms akimbo in the né gesture of submission. Kneel, it sent to the tribesman.
“Foc!” Ardent Fang barked, his upper lip jittery. He bowed from the waist, quickly, and faced the apparition with arms open at his sides but head high.
Drift threw its mind forward. Shay, stranger. We’re wanderers of the Serbota—an ecstasy warrior and his seer. Shay. It thought sun-showers. It thought blue-blossoming trees.
Dawnlight jerked in Sumner’s eyes. He wanted to lash out, to bang into violence and bash himself loose from the numbness in his skull. But the voice in his mind, the same one he had been hearing distantly for two days now, sounded gentle. It came from the short black creature, the hairless thing with the needletip eyes and slash-lips. It had no weapons, but the other one, the squat, hairy one with the lion-eyes and the muzzle face, that one had a blade.
Ardent Fang read Sumner’s gaze and removed the knife slowly, presenting it hilt first.
Sumner waved it away. Why had these twists of distorted flesh dogged him if not to kill? And as soon as he thought that, acid-pain blistered the pan of his skull, and he staggered.
Who are you? the powdery voice asked, and its gentleness soothed him.
Sumner straightened slowly as if rising from a great depth. “Kagan,” he husked.
The seer poked itself, Drift, and pointed to its companion, Ardent Fang. We are Serbota wanderers from the riverain forest to the south. We have come because your presence here has been felt. Can we help you?
Sumner angled his head slightly, surprised that this beetle-shiny thing could reach into his head like a voor.
We are not voors, Drift sent and wished it hadn’t when it saw Kagan stiffen. Just wanderers. I’m a seer—a...This close to Kagan, it could probe deep into his mind—and already it knew that the man no longer intended to harm them, though he still seemed troubled. The word it sought popped into its head:...telepath. Would you like to see?
Sumner frowned, then scowled as the distort reached out with its spiderhands to touch him.
No harm. No deception.
Ardent Fang, seeing Kagan staring at him, took Drift’s other hand. The psychic power that whirled through him brought a blissful, stupid grin to his wolf face.
Sumner eyed the two distorts closely. They seemed much less threatening than they had from a distance. He found it hard to believe that these fear-parched creatures had created that crazy, crooking echo-music that had made him feel the need to confront them. And now? He edged forward and let the distort touch his forearm.
Radiance, clear and balmy, throbbed into him, fringing his whole body with light. Silver volts sparked the surface of his brain. He felt with a kinetic certainty that these were the good people, the joy people. His mind breezed open, empty at last of the demonic squabbling and the welding pain that had frozen his thoughts.
