Radix, page 33
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
For Drift, it had been worse. After the second day on the Road, it had experienced shadowed dreams of voices at a distance, a numbing crack of thunder, and then a lightning-jagged pain in its legs pinning it flat in the abstraction of its sleep. The black core of the nightmare spasmed in its stomach, the odor of blood, and a blow that rent the top of its skull and squashed it dark.
The Road, too, had not felt right. A malevolent presence, dark and preoccupied, had been in the area not long before. In the blue dawn shadows, they had even spotted the tracks of a large man. Drift would not go near the prints. A glassy red light glowed over them, the bloodlight of a deadwalker, a living corpse. In the muted sky, flocks of ravens circled silently.
When they came within sight of Bonescrolls’ tower, neither of them expected to find him alive. Yet, as they came in sight of the collapsed wall and the dark hole at the summit, their hearts constricted. Ardent Fang scrambled up the mound of fallen rock and found Bonescrolls. He dropped to his knees, hands over his face, and howled.
Drift saw the corpse through Ardent Fang’s eyes. Its mind flinched, and it walked numbly around to the cave entrance. By the time it wound its way through the dark corridors and entered the cavern, its shock had settled and the sight of the body impacted less than the rage it felt. A rasping click rattled in its throat, and it fell to the ground and thrashed among the rocks.
Ardent Fang mastered his grief and in the lilac light began gathering pieces of the shattered skull. Overnight the blood had caked, gluing dead flesh to the rock floor. White ants swarmed over the body, and the putrid deathsmell thickened as the day warmed.
By noon, the ants were plucked from the body and all the bits of flesh scraped off the ground and gathered in a scrap of torn cloth. Ardent Fang carried the body down through darkness to the sandy field before the tower.
With a stone wedge fastened to a lopped segment of his walking stick, Ardent Fang fashioned an ax and brought down the tall juniper. Drift arranged the wood into a pyre as Ardent Fang cut it up. Together they sat before the blazing heap, the devil harp warbling a mournful tune while the né chanted:
Like the thunder you begin
Too late
To remember the light....
Sumner followed the nut-sweet fragrance of burning juniper across the evening. At Bonescrolls’ rock abode, smoke idled up, flames muttered. Both Ardent Fang and Drift sat inert, too wasted by grief to move. They watched him approach and met the emptiness in his face and the remote gaze of his eyes.
Drift watched for a moment in the felted silence and noted the wan, fatigued light around his body. The magnar is dead.
The moment distilled to a burning drop of feeling, but Sumner remained expressionless. The bruising hurt quelled almost immediately. Bonescrolls is dead. That thought burned a thinning filament in the emptiness of his mind—a void that, hours before, had contained countless deaths on unnumbered worlds. He squatted in the dust and watched plum-colored stars wink on above the horizon.
Ardent Fang felt a throb of anger at Sumner’s coolness. He wanted to grab that blank face by its long hair and drag it over to the pyre and force it to see the charred corpse. But the moment was—sacred, and he restrained himself. Drift too, disturbed by Sumner’s aloofness, wondered if the warrior perceived how great a loss this was. When the seer reached out with its mind to touch Sumner, it felt itself edging up to a windy cliff-edge. It backed off and married its mind to the shadows and its grief.
Sumner remained emotionally void. Not even the realization that the voor he had mastered with his One Mind would continue to live in his body moved him. The eye of the moment through which everything threaded revealed the pearled light of dusk, silky smoke and red embers in the pyre malign as eyes.
Fatigue ghosted through him, and stray thoughts, cumbersome as sleep, narrowed his awareness: The magnar is dead—no freedom from voors now...Those thoughts dropped away. His exhaustion dropped away. Even his body seemed to drop away. The air smelled slow—the sweet, cold, piney flavor of smoldering desert wood. Pools of silent energy circled around him, turning with the evening colors. In the corners of dusk, the tops of the highest buttes were catching the last slips of light and shining with time.
Sumner closed his eyes, and blue threads of light wormed the darkness. A voice muffled with distance spoke within him: We are one now. Sumner sensed Corby drawing closer. He had the strength to stop him, to turn the alien back. But he had gone empty. Everything moved through him. The voor arrived very close to his senses now, curiously alive and full of loneliness. The wild static of the voor dead browsed in the far distance.
We are one, Corby spoke, quiet as moonlight. I make no demands. But I am within you. I see all that you see. And all that I have is yours. Let us share what we are.
Stoneflakes glinted in the dark depths, and Sumner grew aware of his tranced body knitting itself close to the voor. A wheeling darkness moved through him, and when he opened his eyes he sat alone in the pearl-gray light of dawn.
The tracks of Ardent Fang and Drift wandered off to the north. The pyre had burned out, reduced to a charred circle in the sand. Without thinking it, but knowing it for a voor desire, he went over to the exhausted fire and scooped a handful of the ash into his side pouch. He turned toward Miramol and began to walk. He did not know why he headed there or what he intended to do. It simply felt right.
“After all,” he said aloud to the chemical desert, “the world is feeling.”
***
He passed clay pits where mud-clotted distorts stooped to their work and did not see him go by. In the wide fields beyond, smoke muscled close to the ground. Distorts heated stone kilns, tempering metal and hardening wood. When they spotted him, they cast warding signs in his direction and sent up a shrill alarm on their cricket whistles. Nefandi ignored them. He moved as silently as the smoke he passed through, his sword strapped to his back.
The women and children in the vegetable plots had already scattered by the time he moved between their shaggy green rows. At the treeline, he brought down a young warrior he had spotted with his sensex aiming a blowgun at him from high in a baobab. When the youth thudded to the ground, a loud wailing started in the grass huts.
Nefandi scanned the houses for voor kha. He moved down the length of the tusk- and rib-lined boulevard, his body sheathed in the protective field of his sword. The well-carpentered huts and the immaculate flower lanes shimmered through the field, and a rock tossed from a tree bounced off the air around him, a foot from his head.
At the end of the boulevard, he spotted the knoll of silverwood lodges with their trellises of jungle blossoms. Blue-green kha pulsed behind the walls, and he moved in that direction. Along the way, he studied the distorts studying him from behind the trees and moss curtains. They were symbio-mutants—that is, their mutations provided a necessary component of their lives. They used frequent triple-jointed gestures and ear and scalp expressions that an undistorted human could not. That was possible, he made a mental note, only because of genetic phase-drifting. The mutations were not random. At least most of them weren’t. A fifth of the distorts he had seen so far had dysfunctions that easily would have selected against them without tribal support—such as that legless woman in the doorway to her hut and that blind man under the tree with the fishing net in his lap. Didn’t a tribe advanced enough to cultivate androgs understand the long-term benefits of selective life-privilege? Ach! Useless to ponder.
The né watching Nefandi’s approach from the peepholes of their lodges gaped, appalled. The smell of his mind revealed a killer and, worse, a deadwalker. The shadow-red lifelight about his body appeared sluggish, circling slowly through his chest and brightening only around his head. He was obviously the one who had slain the magnar, though why he had come to them they couldn’t guess. None of them, however, cared. The loss of their benefactor weighed too heavily on their minds, and they resolved without speaking to kill him.
Nefandi moved in a tiger’s slouch up the incline of the knoll. The heat on his back, like a heavy mantle, tangled up his legs and slowed his walk. He squinted and spit out the taste of dust. He would be very relieved to complete this assignment. The howling of the women and children, the aggressive cries of the males, and the oppressive heat made everything look malevolent. Even the silverwood lodges ahead, rippling with emerald kha, seemed threatening. Nefandi knew from his programming that the hermit he had killed had been revered by these people.
He turned up the force of his field and then turned it down again immediately. The drag of energy made walking too difficult. He would just have to stay alert. His dark, furious face swung side to side as he reached the top of the knoll. Most of the lodges turned up empty. But one thrived with kha.
Nefandi did not bother to announce himself. He tried the sliding door and, finding it unlocked, shoved it aside and strode in. A wall of heat with the cooked smell of sweat and stale incense confronted him and stopped his advance. The light in the large room wrinkled with shadows and smoke, and at first only his sensex registered the others: a verdant cloud of kha swirling tighter. His eyes sharpened, and he confronted forty androgs, each one small and burnished black like silver idols smoky with age. The tight eyes beneath the carved eyelines fixed him with serpent rigidity, and before he could move, their kha cramped to a miniature thunderhead in the lap of a blue-robed androg. The thunder-head exploded, the force of it lifting Nefandi off his feet and dashing him against the doorjamb so mightily it splintered outward.
Even through the buffer of his field, the assault struck so powerfully that he blacked out. In that unconscious moment, the crowd of né swarmed over him. They desperately strove to get at him through the field before his alertness jarred back into place.
Infuriated, Nefandi jumped his field to maximum. The sudden burst of power mangled the né around him, exploding those touching the field and smashing the others against the walls of the lodge.
“Abominations!” he howled as he leaped to his feet, sliding on the pooling blood and almost falling. He shut down the field so that he could fire bone-crushing spurts of force at the remaining né. The short, pan-faced creatures scattered, rushing for the windows and small back doors, but Nefandi moved too fast for them. In moments, the horrible, gibbous cries of the né fell to silence, leaving the room tangled with the blood-sprawls of the dead.
Nefandi stalked angrily out of the lodge, fingers trembling. The impact of the energy that had knocked him out still sang along the curve of his skull. He moved swiftly among the moss-shawled trees and down the incline of the knoll toward the heart of the village. His anger, a knot in his throat, squeezed tighter as he realized how treacherously petty his attack had been; the voor he wanted had eluded him.
In the central courtyard of the village, before a natural mist-spring steaming among dark trees, the laughing warriors of the Serbota had gathered. A bull’s-horn formation of men with fishing spears flanked a line of slingshot-armed warriors. In the trees, a squad of hunters with blowguns waited silent as cats. The screams of the dying né had shaken even the boldest of the tribesmen, and as Nefandi strode into sight with sword in hand and the air simmering around him as if heat-crazed, nervous laughter and the awed name of the Dark One spasmed through the ranks.
The tribesmen trembled with fury and edged toward him, fishing spears lowered, all of them pointing at his chest. He moved to shut down his field, and as his hand tightened on the hilt control, a brusque female voice shouted over the mumbled chanting of the warriors. In the mounting furor, Nefandi might not have noticed the voice, but he heard it distinctly in his left ear, spoken in a language he understood. Stop! No more killing! It was as much a telepathic as an auditory command. The tribesmen pulled up their spears and danced anxiously around their fading chant.
Nefandi looked over his shoulder. A hefty old woman in a black shift hobbled toward them, her pasty face set in a grimace of effort. She came up to the edge of the field, small hairs raising all over her body. Why are you killing my people? Her voice snapped in his mind, out of synch with her lips.
Nefandi stared at this woman, who stared back bold as brass. Face puffed beneath lank, age-yellowed hair and a heavy jaw gave her a masculine cast. She held a watchful cunning in her black eyes and a sly suggestion of dark humor in the surly curve of her mouth. The pale round of her forehead caught the sun like metal.
“I was provoked,” Nefandi replied, voice muffled by the field. “I mean no harm. I’m looking for one man—a voor lusk living in this village.”
The old woman’s kha shifted subtly across her eyes, and Nefandi registered that she knew.
I’m Orpha, and I’m responsible for the well-being of these people. With no anger, no edginess to the sound of her voice or the feel of her mind, she appeared uncannily serene, and that chilled his anger to dissatisfaction.
“You know who I’m talking about,” Nefandi said. “Take me to him.”
You must swear by whatever is sacred to you that there will be no further harm to my people. Her eyes fixed him, and they did not flinch when his dark face creased in a cruel smile.
“Nothing is sacred, woman. But I assure you, all I want is this man.”
Orpha lidded her eyes and held her silence. When she opened them she wiped the sweat from her brow, and turned away. Come with me.
Nefandi followed her back down the tusk-lined boulevard to a crude, turquoise-studded hole at the base of a rock mound. He stood diffidently at the lip of the hole, scanning the darkness: no heavy equipment, no metal, and no mechanical traps. He shut down the field and lowered himself into the burrow after Orpha.
Phosphor-tendrils looped over roughhewn walls, making the rock look varnished. He stayed close to Orpha, his hand on his sword hilt, breathing slowly of the dank, incense-stained air. From a distance came the splash of underground cascades. His face tightened in the earth-chill misting off the walls, and he had to close his good eye to see clearly with his sensex in the vague light.
They walked past empty chambers decorated with spider-intricate embroidery, grass hammocks, and wooden implements smooth and lustrous as glass. A curving rock-slab stairway took them down past fans of crystal sediment and spurs of black, greasy-looking rock to a high-domed grotto.
A dozen elderly women sat or stood among glazed siliceous deposits shaped like giant mushrooms. Most of them showed distortions, faces and hands silver-scaled in patches, features bizarrely exaggerated. Sitting prominently on a rock-dome, Orpha and an ancient woman without eyes alone looked whole.
Behind the women, visible in the magnetic range, power hazed, the color of his sword blade. It cut a straight line through the grotto, and he recognized it as the power channel he had followed through the desert.
“Why is he here, Orpha?” the blind woman asked, her empty eyes locked on Nefandi.
“He wants Lotus Face.”
“But the magnar entrusted him to us,” one of the other women protested. She had a sharp weasel face, and she signed obscenely at Nefandi as she spoke.
“The magnar’s ward was ours for one year,” Orpha replied. “That’s over now.”
“And besides,” the blind one said, “the magnar is dead.”
“By this one!” the weasel-face shrilled. “Will we help our own murderer?”
Orpha scowled. “He has killed enough. Let’s be done with him.”
“What do you think, Jesda?” the weasel asked.
“Doom—can’t you feel it?” The blind woman’s fingers twitched before her face. “Whether we help him or not, it is over. Let Lotus Face deal with this deadwalker.”
Nefandi’s face hardened. “Don’t call me that.”
Jesda leaned forward, and the thin light caught the flesh around her sockets and made it glint like snakeskin. “You are a deadwalker. An artificial being. An ort. You know that, don’t you?”
The knuckles on Nefandi’s sword hand whitened, and Orpha spoke up: “Jesda! Let’s be done with him.”
“Don’t fear him, Orpha.” Jesda sat back, a disdainful sneer on her lips. “A man angered by a name is not worth fearing.”
Nefandi grinned, stiff as a skull. “Will you tell me where I can find him?” he asked, his sharp tone shaving the request to a command.
“Ah, deadwalker,” Jesda lamented, shaking her head. “The né that could have told you precisely where he is are now dead. All we can do is indicate where he might be—
“Then do so.” Wariness tempered Nefandi’s anger. He watched carefully as Orpha flashed a hand signal to the other women. Several of them walked across the grotto and stood within the haze of the power channel, their bodies tiny in the basin of dark stone. They joined hands and began walking a slow circle.
“We aren’t as strong as the né,” Jesda acknowledged. “All that we know, they taught us.”
Nefandi heard the ire in her voice and he did not miss the anger in the eyes of the weasel and the other women. “If you mislead me—if there are any tricks—”
Jesda shook her head solemnly. “No deception.”
The women broke off their circling, and one of them approached Orpha. The old woman inclined her head and listened to the other’s whisper.
“Go east,” she told Nefandi. “After walking several minutes you will come to a grove of black pear trees. From there, you should be able to find him yourself.”
Nefandi bowed in mock salute and retreated backward to the stone stairway. After he had left, the weasel screeched and faced Orpha with clenched fists and a frightened, tearful look. “We have betrayed our ward.”
Orpha shrugged. “He’s not our ward. It is Miramol we must protect.”
Jesda cackled. “Protect!” She lost her breath in a fit of silent laughter. “There is nothing to protect, Sisters. Miramol is as mortal as we. Nothing lasts.” She beamed up at the spikes of rock. “That’s why we laugh, isn’t it?”
