Radix, page 32
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
He lumbered flatfooted over bauchy ice. Above him, two suns burned: one low on the horizon and flesh-colored, the other a windy blue and quilted. Arrowstuck, knifestabbed, punctured, he withered, dying. A groan-sore tongue rolled with the flinty taste of blood...
He became an iridescent creature, rooted like a tree, a lantern of water, then a fumy, spiritous mistlife, weeping as it dissolved-A lens—being, moonskulled—A tendriled diatom—
Sumner tried to hold himself back, then toppled, clutched by a force that swept through lifetimes: countless forms, countless worlds. His life drifted, merely another shape. And he knew all of them—he could be any one of them again.
He became a being many times vaster than a whale, a being massive as a planet—reefs of living rock keeling through the sheer light of stars, translating that energy into music. Shining canticles resounded in his mind rapt with curves of distance, dimming as the star-tugs pulled the being away from its sun—
Sumner clutched the earth beneath him and forced himself alert.
The frightening confluence of sounds and images within the inward darkness of his body began to mount again. Fumes of light coiled across his vision, and the haunted wailing tightened in his ears. Still, he remained calm. Nothing could hurt him now, for nothing could touch him. He ranged empty as a cave, senses hollow and intangible as echoes.
Corby loomed wraithlike deep within. The voor was alarmed. A year in Iz without a physical form had made him less. The percussive pulses, the drum and gong of the voor dead no longer affected his howlie body. Not even the entranced vision of Unchala’s slow death with its fervid starsongs could reach Sumner.
It’s me, Father—I can’t go on now without you. Listen to me.
Corby’s voice rippled in Sumner’s ears, burlesqued by the squawk of bereaved cries from the voor dead. Sumner let the voice pass through him like a stray thought.
After so long a journey, can you turn me away? Again, the fireshifting images of the voor-migrations began scrolling through Sumner. Instantly, he slid through murky waters, thin and fish-slippery, feeling unnamable hungers, vision belled by stalk-eyes—
Sumner relaxed his deepest muscles, and the alien sensations slipped away.
Don’t ignore me, Father. Listen—I have knowledge. Corby refocused and let specific bundles of thought arc-jump between him and Sumner.
Bubbles of silver light streamed across Sumner’s mind, bursting into thoughts. All at once, he understood everything about brood jewels. He knew fully and clearly how the seeds formed out of the rare minerals and hormones excreted by certain voors. The technique had been perfected in a distant—galaxy where blue-haired hominids had organs for eliminating excess metal ions from their bodies. Some voors remembered how to draw out these substances, and they had modified their human forms to do so. The seeds, planted in rock faces, exploited mineral content, moisture, and temperature to enhance the metal-locked kha of the donor. After several centuries of growth, the crystals grew large enough for harvest. They formed powerful crystals, for the kha in them had been altered to an Iz-window, an acausal vantage which...
Again, Sumner relaxed his deep muscles, and the thought-volutions narrowed and thinned away.
Are you zaned? Corby’s bleak voice shredded like a vapor in the wind of voorish mumblings. I’m offering you power. I can show you things no human has ever witnessed.
Sumner’s mind flared with knowledge, and he sat up tall, glistening with cold sweat, suddenly understanding the secret of death. Extinction did not follow death after all. The collapse of the organism liberated subtle energies—psynergy. Those life-energies blended with the forces around them, shifted and realigned into other configurations, other lifeforms, many of them unguessable to a human mind.
In the sway of his new power, he glimpsed the advanced forms: lightningflash moments of blue, fragmentary beings wintering in a vastness of tissue-light—too strange to see clearly. Animals like mist, whorling shapes, dissolved into one another with cattle sounds and bird cries. The quick pulsing strength of a bloodied hind rat bled into a starved hawk and the circling pace of an exhausted shark, their hazy psynergies pooling into the tight, hot power of his life—
The vision filmed Sumner’s eyes like a fever. He was breathing hard, and he had to clench his fists to regain a sense of himself. “Teeth dreams,” he mumbled once, and his mind began to clear.
Wait—there’s more. I can show you your eth-power...
Sumner cut off the whining voice in his head. Frost had stiffened his clothing, and his muscles felt leaden.
Corby experienced a surge of power as Sumner’s mind circled in on itself trying to get oriented. In that moment, he realized that he could not overcome Sumner’s strength. The habit patterns and thought routines that Corby had once used to control him had disappeared. The howlie opened empty as a voor mage, and Corby had thinned out, reduced to a mere impulse, and becoming vaguer each day. Only one hope remained. But he would have to act swiftly. The voor surged into Sumner’s consciousness with all his strength.
The sudden assault of voor noise thumped through Sumner’s body. He lurched, hands to his head, feeling a chorus of cries too high for hearing. Pain blurred focus and snatched his strength. He fell back, head thudding to the ground, teeth clashing.
The pain almost crushed him before it eased up. His body breathed again, and his blank brain filled with light. The voices of the voor dead drummed in his bones.
The sun rose over a rimrock, and shafts of light glazed Sumner’s eyes. He blinked, and the rapport between him and Corby shriveled. Help us, Sumner, the voor pleaded. Our journey must continue. But the broods cannot unite without our godminds. We must go on. But we do not have the strength to leave without our godminds. Help us! A cortege of mournful voices writhed between his ears. The Delph is destroying us. You must help us stop him. Shapeless cries flinched in his throat. The Delph...
Sumner reined in his attention and let the lament wrinkle out of hearing. He had listened enough to this voor. Whether this was really Corby or not he couldn’t say. Voors were devious. That much he had learned from Jeanlu. He wanted nothing more to do with them.
He swayed to his feet and stretched the ache out of his muscles. With morning sunlight glinting off the dunes and warming his numbed flesh, he felt good. Bonescrolls’ final command had been fulfilled. Now he could seek him out and get purged of this possession.
No more voors. No more teeth dreams. Enough illusion occupied his life without the memories of long dead worlds.
Even so, as he staggered over the windfolded sand, he marveled that such beings existed—beings of light, reshaping bodies, forever wandering. There was no loneliness like theirs.
***
Nefandi stood in the shadow of a balanced rock staring across distorting lenses of heated air on the desert floor. No life stirred anywhere among the cliffs of mangled and rusted iron. White, depthless sky hung empty even of clouds, and ridges and defiles edged in black and purple wavered in thermal currents like a hallucination.
Why would anyone choose to live in this death hole? he wondered, gnawing on the frayed tip of an unlit cheroot. He removed his wide-brimmed leather hat and wiped sweat from his face. The heat made him look sad, but menace still showed in his one red eye and along the glossy, rippled scar that stitched his dark face from mirror-shard eye to wide, clamped jaw. He placed his hat back over his spiked hair, took a swig of water from a flask, and strode out into the ponderous sun.
His loose tawny trousers and shirt, designed to protect him from stinging sand, captured heat and baked his flesh. To keep his mind off his suffering, he thought back on where he had come from. A tame world of small, biotectured villages: Nanda with its bluffs and milk-blue lakes; Sidhe, the floating stone city; and Cleyre, exquisite Cleyre, meadows exploding with aster and cyclamen, trout streams clean as light. As a Rubeus-programmed assassin, his strongest memories began in the ice-valley laboratories of Graal, the Delph’s stronghold. His new body awaited him there. But now was too lonely a time to be thinking of home.
Nefandi slid into selfscan and picked up his pace, hugging shadows under wind-eaten rock walls. He entered the sun only when enormous potholes and fissures blocked his way. A chill flowed with the sunlight, a somnolence that he knew well. The heat had begun killing him, and several times, each time sooner, he had to stop and refresh himself.
Sitting in the dry heat of the shade, he cursed Rubeus for sending him here, though in the back of his mind he knew that if he had to choose over again, he would be right where he was now. How could he choose otherwise? Rubeus had promised him a new body—his third—if he succeeded in this mission. Rubeus served as the Delph’s guardian. An artificial mind, an ort like Nefandi—but vaster, the size of a mountain and huge with power—Rubeus could easily weave him a new body, and for that privilege Nefandi would do anything.
But why am I ordered to take the long way around? He cleared the sweat from his one red-veined eye and stood up. Heat waves floated in glassy lavers, veiling the distances he had to cross. Rubeus had said this mission would be difficult. The person he stalked was supposedly very powerful. He has to be to live in this hell maze.
Sometime during the solar heat-crazed hours of the afternoon a raven began wheeling high over Nefandi’s head. In the sensex embedded behind his mirror eye, he could detect nothing unusual about it, but the bird behaved strangely. It followed him, despite shriveling heat and his attempts to lose it among the arches and tunnel rocks. Finally, he had to kill it. He brought it down with a burst from his unsheathed field-sword. Unfolding its wings in his hands, he could detect nothing unusual about it.
Not long afterward, as he followed a rain-trail down an escarpment of smoldering red bordered with charcoal, another raven began ringing through the sky above. He ignored it. His destination loomed close now, and he had no time for desert anomalies. All around him lay a labyrinth of basins, towers, and fins of naked stone. The sandstone, crossbedded and checkered, seamed by old fault lines, appeared bizarrely sculptured. It took all his skill to cross the tilted ledges in the fearful glare of the sun.
As he edged along a rim that curled over a kniferock ravine, the circling raven swooped. It clawed the back of his neck, and he yelped and danced for his footing. The sandstone powdered beneath his frantic weight and hissed into long, thin fractures. Only selfscan and luck carried him across before the rim crumbled and whispered into the abyss.
Nefandi searched the sky and the rock walls for the raven. Apprehensively he moved on, scrambling over rocks that seesawed under his weight. By the time he reached the sand bowl of a saddle basin, his clothes clung, pasty with sweat and fear.
Again he searched for the raven. Nothing living presented itself, yet a new feeling prickled around him. The sensation he had been coded to feel when near his objective came on as he slid over the loose rock slabs, and he concentrated to feel its source. A tall crest of rock, windsmoothed and arching like a wave, emanated a dull lifenergy. The sensex detected nothing, but the more sensitive sensors embedded in his skull definitely reacted to a strong life-presence.
Nefandi unsheathed the silver-gold sword strapped to his back and approached the sweep of rock. A gully of frantic stones and boulders blocked a direct advance, and he circled the tower. At the side, he stopped cold and crouched behind a sand-buffed outcropping. Beside the tower, a juniper stood, crowded with silent ravens. They angled their small heads to watch him as he stepped into the clearing. They made no sound, and they barely stirred.
With his mind held rigidly in selfscan and his sword angled before him, he skirted the raven tree and ducked into a cave mouth at the base of the tower. As silently as his anxious legs could move, he mounted the steep incline following the directional cues of his sensors. The person he had been sent to kill waited up ahead at the top of the tower. Nefandi’s sense of that person deepened, and he negotiated forking and curving corridors without hesitation. But halfway to the top, he froze, halted by an unusual sound.
He leaned on his sword and listened to rustling, snapping noises. He bolted forward, and the next instant the first of the ravens clawed into his back. He slapped it off with his sword, not breaking his stride. The others followed quickly, and soon they engulfed him in black beating wings and ripping claws.
Not daring to activate his field inside the tower for fear that the sandstone would collapse around him, he slashed at the rabid birds with his sword. Too many of them drummed at his back, snapping over his shoulders, darting their claws at his one real eye. Sticky blood pooled in his ears and splattered his cheeks. He lashed madly, stumbled and curled into a ball as the needlebeaks stabbed his back. With a gnashed cry, he activated the field of his sword. Ravens burst above him in an explosion of feathers and torn shrieks. And higher, almost too high to hear, the sandstone walls whined and began to hiss.
Nefandi shut down the field and lunged to his feet. He dashed along the cramped corridor, pulling himself up blind inclines, using his sensex in the far infrared to make out the pathways. A raven hammered into him from behind. He spun about and whacked it in half. Gasping, he waited with raised sword for the others, but no others attacked.
After several more turns, the darkness relented, and he followed the light and the cool air to a sweeping cavern lanced with skyholes and natural windows. Bonescrolls sat crosslegged before one of the large oval openings, wearing linen trousers and a shirt of pristine white. He smiled broadly, wild white hair glowing in the afternoon sunlight like a nimbus.
“Welcome, Death,” the magnar said, his face radiant as a dream. “Come in! Come in!”
Nefandi took a wary step forward. Sensors trilled insanely in his head. Kill him now, the implanted command urged, and his sword arm raised and leveled his weapon. But he did not fire. The race through the darkness, the ravens, and now this smiling old man left him feeling giddy.
“A drink?” Bonescrolls held up a clear jug half-filled with green wine. The magnar’s hand trembled, and looking closer, Nefandi observed the old man’s fear.
The assassin lowered his sword and stepped forward, his sensex scanning the cavern for hidden weapons.
Bonescrolls poured out two cupfuls, frowning to master the tremor in his fingers. “I’m a little nervous, Death.” He held out one of the blue-glazed mugs. “I had hoped that I wouldn’t be. After all, I’ve seen this coming for a long time.”
Nefandi stood before Bonescrolls and waved away the drink. A trickle of blood dropped from his chin and splattered in the dust between them. Who was this old man? The kha around him shimmered, extraordinarily thin. Most of the life-energy had coiled into his abdomen. The man obviously possessed profound power, yet he looked like a drunk.
Bonescrolls nodded and tugged nervously at his hair. “Appearances always tell the truth—if you look close enough,” he said, voice splintering. “I am a drunk. I’m inebriated with life. That’s why I came out here.” He chuckled, making a high nasal sound like the whinny of an uneasy horse. “I thought this inhospitable land would wean me away from life. But there is beauty in being. I understand now that if I lived ten thousand years, I would still want more.”
A talker, Nefandi thought. He is a drunk. He watched the magnar sip his drink and blink slowly with satisfaction. Bonescrolls put his mug down and looked up at Nefandi, his face composed, eyes alert and moist. “There is so much to know, to see, to feel.” He sighed and flicked his eyebrows. “I don’t suppose I could entreat you in any way to let me live?”
Nefandi stared back at him, cool as silver.
The old man nodded and put one hand over his heart. “Okay.” His upper lip went taut. “My whimpering is over.”
Nefandi brought up his sword, but as his hand moved to activate it, Bonescrolls’ body unsprung. His legs kicked out, and the flagon of wine flew into Nefandi’s face. The assassin dodged it clumsily, and his hand fear-twitched on the sword, firing a burst of power. The blast hit the ledge of the oval window with a scream of ripping rock. Shock-severed chunks of the ceiling collapsed in streamers of dust, and the whole face of the struck wall groaned mightily and dropped away.
Bonescrolls had rolled clear of the falling wall, but a massive slab of the ceiling slammed him flat, pinning both of his legs. Nefandi had leaped back and hunched against a far wall. As the dust churned and settled, he stepped forward, a wild tic at the scarred corner of his mouth and a dark look in his smoky red eye. He stalked up to where Bonescrolls lay stretched out on his back and stomped the heel of his boot into the old man’s belly.
The magnar wheezed and smiled, thick lips flecked with pink froth. “Even truth is a boulder.” He laughed softly, face luminous until Nefandi blew off the top of his head.
“Stupid old man,” he grumbled, turning away from the inert body. He went over to the shattered edge of the cavern where a new, wide vista opened. Whiskey-colored light angled between buttes and spires. In the east, long bars of clouds gathered, driftwood-blue in the late sun.
Killing’s unimportant, he told himself as he gingerly fingered the claw marks on his face. We’re all killed by something sooner or later. It’s dignity that counts, and there would have been more for that old man if he hadn’t struggled. Stupid fool. A man with that much kha should be ready to live his death.
He sheathed his sword and kicked the wine jug over the broken edge of the cavern. His work was not yet finished. One more death stood between him and his new life. A Massebôth soldier in lusk had to be put out of his misery. He lived with the Serbota, a primitive tribe several days away. At least this would be a mercy death.
Nefandi did not like killing hermits or old men. He didn’t look back as he left, but he did wonder what Bonescrolls had meant: Truth is a boulder. The man was a soak, all right. A real talker. Who was he? Ach! Useless to ponder.
***
Smoke-blue dawn filled the sky when Drift and Ardent Fang came out of the north. They approached Bonescrolls’ rock tower slowly and diffidently. Ardent Fang led the way, eyes sliding warily, knife drawn. He had shared Drift’s nightmares of shards and lumps of bloody flesh and bones in the smoke of bones, and he woke each time chewing his screams.
He became an iridescent creature, rooted like a tree, a lantern of water, then a fumy, spiritous mistlife, weeping as it dissolved-A lens—being, moonskulled—A tendriled diatom—
Sumner tried to hold himself back, then toppled, clutched by a force that swept through lifetimes: countless forms, countless worlds. His life drifted, merely another shape. And he knew all of them—he could be any one of them again.
He became a being many times vaster than a whale, a being massive as a planet—reefs of living rock keeling through the sheer light of stars, translating that energy into music. Shining canticles resounded in his mind rapt with curves of distance, dimming as the star-tugs pulled the being away from its sun—
Sumner clutched the earth beneath him and forced himself alert.
The frightening confluence of sounds and images within the inward darkness of his body began to mount again. Fumes of light coiled across his vision, and the haunted wailing tightened in his ears. Still, he remained calm. Nothing could hurt him now, for nothing could touch him. He ranged empty as a cave, senses hollow and intangible as echoes.
Corby loomed wraithlike deep within. The voor was alarmed. A year in Iz without a physical form had made him less. The percussive pulses, the drum and gong of the voor dead no longer affected his howlie body. Not even the entranced vision of Unchala’s slow death with its fervid starsongs could reach Sumner.
It’s me, Father—I can’t go on now without you. Listen to me.
Corby’s voice rippled in Sumner’s ears, burlesqued by the squawk of bereaved cries from the voor dead. Sumner let the voice pass through him like a stray thought.
After so long a journey, can you turn me away? Again, the fireshifting images of the voor-migrations began scrolling through Sumner. Instantly, he slid through murky waters, thin and fish-slippery, feeling unnamable hungers, vision belled by stalk-eyes—
Sumner relaxed his deepest muscles, and the alien sensations slipped away.
Don’t ignore me, Father. Listen—I have knowledge. Corby refocused and let specific bundles of thought arc-jump between him and Sumner.
Bubbles of silver light streamed across Sumner’s mind, bursting into thoughts. All at once, he understood everything about brood jewels. He knew fully and clearly how the seeds formed out of the rare minerals and hormones excreted by certain voors. The technique had been perfected in a distant—galaxy where blue-haired hominids had organs for eliminating excess metal ions from their bodies. Some voors remembered how to draw out these substances, and they had modified their human forms to do so. The seeds, planted in rock faces, exploited mineral content, moisture, and temperature to enhance the metal-locked kha of the donor. After several centuries of growth, the crystals grew large enough for harvest. They formed powerful crystals, for the kha in them had been altered to an Iz-window, an acausal vantage which...
Again, Sumner relaxed his deep muscles, and the thought-volutions narrowed and thinned away.
Are you zaned? Corby’s bleak voice shredded like a vapor in the wind of voorish mumblings. I’m offering you power. I can show you things no human has ever witnessed.
Sumner’s mind flared with knowledge, and he sat up tall, glistening with cold sweat, suddenly understanding the secret of death. Extinction did not follow death after all. The collapse of the organism liberated subtle energies—psynergy. Those life-energies blended with the forces around them, shifted and realigned into other configurations, other lifeforms, many of them unguessable to a human mind.
In the sway of his new power, he glimpsed the advanced forms: lightningflash moments of blue, fragmentary beings wintering in a vastness of tissue-light—too strange to see clearly. Animals like mist, whorling shapes, dissolved into one another with cattle sounds and bird cries. The quick pulsing strength of a bloodied hind rat bled into a starved hawk and the circling pace of an exhausted shark, their hazy psynergies pooling into the tight, hot power of his life—
The vision filmed Sumner’s eyes like a fever. He was breathing hard, and he had to clench his fists to regain a sense of himself. “Teeth dreams,” he mumbled once, and his mind began to clear.
Wait—there’s more. I can show you your eth-power...
Sumner cut off the whining voice in his head. Frost had stiffened his clothing, and his muscles felt leaden.
Corby experienced a surge of power as Sumner’s mind circled in on itself trying to get oriented. In that moment, he realized that he could not overcome Sumner’s strength. The habit patterns and thought routines that Corby had once used to control him had disappeared. The howlie opened empty as a voor mage, and Corby had thinned out, reduced to a mere impulse, and becoming vaguer each day. Only one hope remained. But he would have to act swiftly. The voor surged into Sumner’s consciousness with all his strength.
The sudden assault of voor noise thumped through Sumner’s body. He lurched, hands to his head, feeling a chorus of cries too high for hearing. Pain blurred focus and snatched his strength. He fell back, head thudding to the ground, teeth clashing.
The pain almost crushed him before it eased up. His body breathed again, and his blank brain filled with light. The voices of the voor dead drummed in his bones.
The sun rose over a rimrock, and shafts of light glazed Sumner’s eyes. He blinked, and the rapport between him and Corby shriveled. Help us, Sumner, the voor pleaded. Our journey must continue. But the broods cannot unite without our godminds. We must go on. But we do not have the strength to leave without our godminds. Help us! A cortege of mournful voices writhed between his ears. The Delph is destroying us. You must help us stop him. Shapeless cries flinched in his throat. The Delph...
Sumner reined in his attention and let the lament wrinkle out of hearing. He had listened enough to this voor. Whether this was really Corby or not he couldn’t say. Voors were devious. That much he had learned from Jeanlu. He wanted nothing more to do with them.
He swayed to his feet and stretched the ache out of his muscles. With morning sunlight glinting off the dunes and warming his numbed flesh, he felt good. Bonescrolls’ final command had been fulfilled. Now he could seek him out and get purged of this possession.
No more voors. No more teeth dreams. Enough illusion occupied his life without the memories of long dead worlds.
Even so, as he staggered over the windfolded sand, he marveled that such beings existed—beings of light, reshaping bodies, forever wandering. There was no loneliness like theirs.
***
Nefandi stood in the shadow of a balanced rock staring across distorting lenses of heated air on the desert floor. No life stirred anywhere among the cliffs of mangled and rusted iron. White, depthless sky hung empty even of clouds, and ridges and defiles edged in black and purple wavered in thermal currents like a hallucination.
Why would anyone choose to live in this death hole? he wondered, gnawing on the frayed tip of an unlit cheroot. He removed his wide-brimmed leather hat and wiped sweat from his face. The heat made him look sad, but menace still showed in his one red eye and along the glossy, rippled scar that stitched his dark face from mirror-shard eye to wide, clamped jaw. He placed his hat back over his spiked hair, took a swig of water from a flask, and strode out into the ponderous sun.
His loose tawny trousers and shirt, designed to protect him from stinging sand, captured heat and baked his flesh. To keep his mind off his suffering, he thought back on where he had come from. A tame world of small, biotectured villages: Nanda with its bluffs and milk-blue lakes; Sidhe, the floating stone city; and Cleyre, exquisite Cleyre, meadows exploding with aster and cyclamen, trout streams clean as light. As a Rubeus-programmed assassin, his strongest memories began in the ice-valley laboratories of Graal, the Delph’s stronghold. His new body awaited him there. But now was too lonely a time to be thinking of home.
Nefandi slid into selfscan and picked up his pace, hugging shadows under wind-eaten rock walls. He entered the sun only when enormous potholes and fissures blocked his way. A chill flowed with the sunlight, a somnolence that he knew well. The heat had begun killing him, and several times, each time sooner, he had to stop and refresh himself.
Sitting in the dry heat of the shade, he cursed Rubeus for sending him here, though in the back of his mind he knew that if he had to choose over again, he would be right where he was now. How could he choose otherwise? Rubeus had promised him a new body—his third—if he succeeded in this mission. Rubeus served as the Delph’s guardian. An artificial mind, an ort like Nefandi—but vaster, the size of a mountain and huge with power—Rubeus could easily weave him a new body, and for that privilege Nefandi would do anything.
But why am I ordered to take the long way around? He cleared the sweat from his one red-veined eye and stood up. Heat waves floated in glassy lavers, veiling the distances he had to cross. Rubeus had said this mission would be difficult. The person he stalked was supposedly very powerful. He has to be to live in this hell maze.
Sometime during the solar heat-crazed hours of the afternoon a raven began wheeling high over Nefandi’s head. In the sensex embedded behind his mirror eye, he could detect nothing unusual about it, but the bird behaved strangely. It followed him, despite shriveling heat and his attempts to lose it among the arches and tunnel rocks. Finally, he had to kill it. He brought it down with a burst from his unsheathed field-sword. Unfolding its wings in his hands, he could detect nothing unusual about it.
Not long afterward, as he followed a rain-trail down an escarpment of smoldering red bordered with charcoal, another raven began ringing through the sky above. He ignored it. His destination loomed close now, and he had no time for desert anomalies. All around him lay a labyrinth of basins, towers, and fins of naked stone. The sandstone, crossbedded and checkered, seamed by old fault lines, appeared bizarrely sculptured. It took all his skill to cross the tilted ledges in the fearful glare of the sun.
As he edged along a rim that curled over a kniferock ravine, the circling raven swooped. It clawed the back of his neck, and he yelped and danced for his footing. The sandstone powdered beneath his frantic weight and hissed into long, thin fractures. Only selfscan and luck carried him across before the rim crumbled and whispered into the abyss.
Nefandi searched the sky and the rock walls for the raven. Apprehensively he moved on, scrambling over rocks that seesawed under his weight. By the time he reached the sand bowl of a saddle basin, his clothes clung, pasty with sweat and fear.
Again he searched for the raven. Nothing living presented itself, yet a new feeling prickled around him. The sensation he had been coded to feel when near his objective came on as he slid over the loose rock slabs, and he concentrated to feel its source. A tall crest of rock, windsmoothed and arching like a wave, emanated a dull lifenergy. The sensex detected nothing, but the more sensitive sensors embedded in his skull definitely reacted to a strong life-presence.
Nefandi unsheathed the silver-gold sword strapped to his back and approached the sweep of rock. A gully of frantic stones and boulders blocked a direct advance, and he circled the tower. At the side, he stopped cold and crouched behind a sand-buffed outcropping. Beside the tower, a juniper stood, crowded with silent ravens. They angled their small heads to watch him as he stepped into the clearing. They made no sound, and they barely stirred.
With his mind held rigidly in selfscan and his sword angled before him, he skirted the raven tree and ducked into a cave mouth at the base of the tower. As silently as his anxious legs could move, he mounted the steep incline following the directional cues of his sensors. The person he had been sent to kill waited up ahead at the top of the tower. Nefandi’s sense of that person deepened, and he negotiated forking and curving corridors without hesitation. But halfway to the top, he froze, halted by an unusual sound.
He leaned on his sword and listened to rustling, snapping noises. He bolted forward, and the next instant the first of the ravens clawed into his back. He slapped it off with his sword, not breaking his stride. The others followed quickly, and soon they engulfed him in black beating wings and ripping claws.
Not daring to activate his field inside the tower for fear that the sandstone would collapse around him, he slashed at the rabid birds with his sword. Too many of them drummed at his back, snapping over his shoulders, darting their claws at his one real eye. Sticky blood pooled in his ears and splattered his cheeks. He lashed madly, stumbled and curled into a ball as the needlebeaks stabbed his back. With a gnashed cry, he activated the field of his sword. Ravens burst above him in an explosion of feathers and torn shrieks. And higher, almost too high to hear, the sandstone walls whined and began to hiss.
Nefandi shut down the field and lunged to his feet. He dashed along the cramped corridor, pulling himself up blind inclines, using his sensex in the far infrared to make out the pathways. A raven hammered into him from behind. He spun about and whacked it in half. Gasping, he waited with raised sword for the others, but no others attacked.
After several more turns, the darkness relented, and he followed the light and the cool air to a sweeping cavern lanced with skyholes and natural windows. Bonescrolls sat crosslegged before one of the large oval openings, wearing linen trousers and a shirt of pristine white. He smiled broadly, wild white hair glowing in the afternoon sunlight like a nimbus.
“Welcome, Death,” the magnar said, his face radiant as a dream. “Come in! Come in!”
Nefandi took a wary step forward. Sensors trilled insanely in his head. Kill him now, the implanted command urged, and his sword arm raised and leveled his weapon. But he did not fire. The race through the darkness, the ravens, and now this smiling old man left him feeling giddy.
“A drink?” Bonescrolls held up a clear jug half-filled with green wine. The magnar’s hand trembled, and looking closer, Nefandi observed the old man’s fear.
The assassin lowered his sword and stepped forward, his sensex scanning the cavern for hidden weapons.
Bonescrolls poured out two cupfuls, frowning to master the tremor in his fingers. “I’m a little nervous, Death.” He held out one of the blue-glazed mugs. “I had hoped that I wouldn’t be. After all, I’ve seen this coming for a long time.”
Nefandi stood before Bonescrolls and waved away the drink. A trickle of blood dropped from his chin and splattered in the dust between them. Who was this old man? The kha around him shimmered, extraordinarily thin. Most of the life-energy had coiled into his abdomen. The man obviously possessed profound power, yet he looked like a drunk.
Bonescrolls nodded and tugged nervously at his hair. “Appearances always tell the truth—if you look close enough,” he said, voice splintering. “I am a drunk. I’m inebriated with life. That’s why I came out here.” He chuckled, making a high nasal sound like the whinny of an uneasy horse. “I thought this inhospitable land would wean me away from life. But there is beauty in being. I understand now that if I lived ten thousand years, I would still want more.”
A talker, Nefandi thought. He is a drunk. He watched the magnar sip his drink and blink slowly with satisfaction. Bonescrolls put his mug down and looked up at Nefandi, his face composed, eyes alert and moist. “There is so much to know, to see, to feel.” He sighed and flicked his eyebrows. “I don’t suppose I could entreat you in any way to let me live?”
Nefandi stared back at him, cool as silver.
The old man nodded and put one hand over his heart. “Okay.” His upper lip went taut. “My whimpering is over.”
Nefandi brought up his sword, but as his hand moved to activate it, Bonescrolls’ body unsprung. His legs kicked out, and the flagon of wine flew into Nefandi’s face. The assassin dodged it clumsily, and his hand fear-twitched on the sword, firing a burst of power. The blast hit the ledge of the oval window with a scream of ripping rock. Shock-severed chunks of the ceiling collapsed in streamers of dust, and the whole face of the struck wall groaned mightily and dropped away.
Bonescrolls had rolled clear of the falling wall, but a massive slab of the ceiling slammed him flat, pinning both of his legs. Nefandi had leaped back and hunched against a far wall. As the dust churned and settled, he stepped forward, a wild tic at the scarred corner of his mouth and a dark look in his smoky red eye. He stalked up to where Bonescrolls lay stretched out on his back and stomped the heel of his boot into the old man’s belly.
The magnar wheezed and smiled, thick lips flecked with pink froth. “Even truth is a boulder.” He laughed softly, face luminous until Nefandi blew off the top of his head.
“Stupid old man,” he grumbled, turning away from the inert body. He went over to the shattered edge of the cavern where a new, wide vista opened. Whiskey-colored light angled between buttes and spires. In the east, long bars of clouds gathered, driftwood-blue in the late sun.
Killing’s unimportant, he told himself as he gingerly fingered the claw marks on his face. We’re all killed by something sooner or later. It’s dignity that counts, and there would have been more for that old man if he hadn’t struggled. Stupid fool. A man with that much kha should be ready to live his death.
He sheathed his sword and kicked the wine jug over the broken edge of the cavern. His work was not yet finished. One more death stood between him and his new life. A Massebôth soldier in lusk had to be put out of his misery. He lived with the Serbota, a primitive tribe several days away. At least this would be a mercy death.
Nefandi did not like killing hermits or old men. He didn’t look back as he left, but he did wonder what Bonescrolls had meant: Truth is a boulder. The man was a soak, all right. A real talker. Who was he? Ach! Useless to ponder.
***
Smoke-blue dawn filled the sky when Drift and Ardent Fang came out of the north. They approached Bonescrolls’ rock tower slowly and diffidently. Ardent Fang led the way, eyes sliding warily, knife drawn. He had shared Drift’s nightmares of shards and lumps of bloody flesh and bones in the smoke of bones, and he woke each time chewing his screams.
