Radix, page 34
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
***
Nefandi emerged into the hum of sunlight and activated his field immediately. Brightness knocked his vision, and he shifted to his sensex. A line of tribal warriors had formed a semicircle beneath the silver-green foliage of the jungle. They began to hiss and click as soon as he appeared, but they fell silent when he came toward them.
At the end of the main boulevard, several hunters spoke with frantic animation to another warrior and an androg. Desert sand furred both the warrior and the androg with a rosy patina.
Nefandi walked east, through the line of warriors and across the boulevard. Suddenly the dusty warrior pushed aside the hunters and rushed at him. Only the urgent squawking of the né kept him from colliding with the field.
Get away from him, Fang! Drift begged, coming up and tugging at Ardent Fang’s arm. The Mothers have taken care of him. He’s leaving now.
Ardent Fang barked at the one-eyed stranger. Fury pounded in his throat, but the obvious futility of attacking the man held him back. He could see the sheen of the shield around him.
“He killed the magnar!” Ardent Fang bawled. “He has the same light that we saw on the Road. We can’t let him get away.”
Drift clung to his arm. We have no choice. You saw what he did to the né.
Ardent Fang snarled as Nefandi moved past him. “Deadwalker, only your sorcery protects you!”
Nefandi ignored the lionfaced distort, rechecked his direction, and entered the jungle along a narrow gatherer’s trail. If that old blind witch hadn’t lied to him, his work would soon be over. He could return to Cleyre, to a new body, to the simple pleasures of his easy life, and leave behind the heat and the hostility of this place. He ducked beneath a low branch and heard the wood explode against the field. Reluctantly, he shut it down, scanning all about him for others, and hurrying his pace down the trail.
Ardent Fang watched him disappear into the bush. He felt the restless urge to heave a rock after him. Instead, he turned to Drift, and they walked slowly down the boulevard.
We must prepare the dead.
Ardent Fang didn’t acknowledge the seer. He walked with his head slung forward, brow pressed tight above his eyes. “What did the Mothers do to get him out of here?” He kicked a clod of earth to dust. “Why was he here in the first place?”
Drift scavenged for an answer, but before it could respond, the tribesman spit and turned about abruptly. He loped back down the boulevard and shoved brusquely through a crowd of warriors, hissing back at them as he jogged up to the Barrow. Entry forbidden him by tradition, he stooped over the hole and howled. Drift tried to pull him away, but he persisted until a stick-thin, weasel-faced Mother appeared out of the darkness.
“Why are you bawling, breeder?” the Mother asked in her annoyed, reedy voice.
“Tell me where the deadwalker is going.”
The Mother laughed with disdain. “Away, brute.”
Ardent Fang dropped into the hole and grabbed the woman by her shift. The material ripped as he lifted her off her feet and slammed her into the wall. “Where, woman?”
“I-can’t-breathe!” she gasped. He tightened his grip, and she gagged. “To-find-Lo-tus-Face!” Her eyes bugged out, and her lips went taut.
Ardent Fang threw her to the ground and bounded out of the hole. He rolled down the incline and broke into a scramble for the jungle. Drift peered into the burrow and, seeing that the Mother was all right, bolted after Ardent Fang.
The sensors embedded in Nefandi’s skull began a low drawl that burred behind his eyes. The voor must be nearby, though his sensex hadn’t yet picked him out. He pushed through a tangle of fronds and entered a small grove of black pear trees. Flies whined about him, and he nudged the field to its lowest setting. From behind him came the thrash of someone running through the jungle. He swiveled and scanned the way he had come.
The lionfaced warrior leaped into sight through a smoke bush, still a distance off. Nefandi fired a single power burst, but by some incredible fortune the distort rolled to the ground the instant the weapon fired.
Nefandi aimed more carefully and fired a longer burst, and again the warrior lunged out of the way and dashed closer. He already had his knife out, and Nefandi could see the fierce determination in his yellow eyes.
Drift ran hard to keep Ardent Fang in sight, its chest spiked with pain. But no matter how warped its lungs felt, no matter how much its breath seared its throat, it sprinted on, dodging roots and low-lying branches. As long as Ardent Fang stayed in sight, it could cue him to Nefandi’s attacks. Right! it fervently sent, envisioning Nefandi’s impulse to cut off Ardent Fang’s left-dodge.
Ardent Fang spun right, and the blast from Nefandi’s sword ruptured a tree trunk with a clout of noise and a spray of wood splinters.
Roll! Ardent Fang rolled, and another slash of energy frittered the leaves above him. Up left! He swung to his feet and curled left as invisible power chewed the ground beside him to a mash.
Nefandi staggered back, stunned. Ardent Fang closed in, knife low and tilted forward. He prepared to lash out with a long, sustained sweep of ripping energy, but a daring impulse sparked through him, and he hesitated. With his sword angled to the ground, he crouched, eyes alert to every ripple of muscle on the distort leaping at him.
He waited until Ardent Fang poised in mid-leap, level with his face, arms spread, yellow eyes raving. Nefandi threw his field up full. The lunging warrior exploded into a tattering of guts and jumping blood. The force of the impact burst the branches of nearby trees and kicked Drift onto its back, slapping it with a mass of hot roping viscera.
Nefandi shut down the field and rolled to the center of the pear grove. His sensors squealed, and he did a quick scan of the surrounding foliage. A glaucous bodylight shifted stealthily through the undergrowth—yellow-golden, the size of a man. He fired a tight burst at it. The leaves danced and scattered, and the kha-light flashed to nothing.
Still on his belly, he scanned the terrain again. The androg stared at him through the quag of his companion’s entrails, too stunned to move. A bird chattered tentatively, and the derelict sounds of fleeing monkeys muffled away. The sensors in his skull had gone quiet, and he got to his feet slowly. It was finished.
Cleyre loomed closer now. He could smell the chicory coffee he would have while sitting on his blossom-arbored patio. He smiled away his fantasy and went over to inspect the body. Was his victim relieved to die—happy to be liberated from the horror of his lusk? Or had the voor become familiar to him? Perhaps they had shared a life. Useless to ponder.
He used his sword to force aside the tangled brier. Draped over a fallen tree, head cleaved open, a silver puma lay. Nefandi stood baffled and was still pondering how an animal could have had so highly developed a kha when Sumner unfolded from his cover of brambles behind the big cat. He had no kha. The voor held all his psynergy deep within.
Nefandi staggered back, but not before Sumner grabbed his sword arm. He gripped it so hard the muscles unflexed, and the weapon dropped. Nefandi’s mind lurched. The black rainbow-glossed face transfixed him—eyes flat, indifferent, and slow...
Nefandi’s free arm gouge-slashed and got slapped away. He twisted, and the hand clamping his arm squeezed tighter, tugging him forward. A knife flashed in Sumner’s grip, and Nefandi watched the blade slide between his ribs. A scream kicked in his throat. He bucked and thrashed, a dumb hilarity whirling inside him, spinning itself out. His whole body stiffened, and he sagged to the ground, drained, only a shape.
Sumner let the body fall. He looked at the limbs folded like wet cardboard, the fright-glare in the one eye, and a finger twitching, frantic for a signal from the stopped brain.
He bent over to wipe his blade on Nefandi’s shirt, and the hushed voice of the voor opened in him. You trusted me, Sumner, and I did not fail you. We are as good as one now. We are the same.
He sheathed his knife, picked up Nefandi’s sword, and stepped over the body.
Drift, blood-splattered and limping, met him in the clearing of the pear grove. Its bead eyes had clouded over, and at first Sumner felt nothing from it but a cold mist, shadowy and languid. Then the seer’s voice entered his mind: Why didn’t you save him? It held up its hands, slick with Ardent Fang’s blood. You saw what was happening. Why didn’t you save him?
“The voor was holding my kha back, Drift. If I had moved or even thought, we’d both be dead now. I had to let Fang go.”
Drift stared at him, its bloody hands raised. I thought you were human. Its eyes glistened, and its look frayed. It turned away. You’re more voor than man.
Sumner watched after the seer until it passed among the trees and out of sight. Nothing is ever lost—it’s just on its way back, he said to himself.
That thought began a slow loop through his mind—a mantra that set his feet moving, that marched him out of the forest and into the sun-veiled landscape of Skylonda Aptos.
He walked hard through the primeval chaos of faulted, uplifted and folded rock. In a desolate spot, he buried Nefandi’s sword, and then continued his grief-march. When the sky filled with colored vapors, he sat with his back to a stone arch and stared out at the darkening reef of clouds. He had killed Ardent Fang—the way he had killed Bonescrolls, by inaction. He had let the human love in him die. He was a voor, and that awareness immobilized him. Dervishes of red dust spun over the arid flats. Llyr glinted above the horizon, small and glassy. A cold wind deepened.
***
At dawn, Sumner awakened to the sound of metal punching the air—engines. The noise sounded terrifying coming across the barren and shattered land. He mounted the stone arch and witnessed a convoy of yellow and brown troop carriers rumbling across the mangled terrain. Green flags stenciled with black and white pillars stretched over the sides of the treaded vehicles.
Sumner sprinted over swells and folds of maroon rock to intercept the lead carrier. When they spotted him, the convoy bawled to a stop and several men in desert camouflage suits jumped down, rifles ready.
Sumner identified himself, and the men quickly hustled him onto the top deck of the point carrier. With a screech of fatigued metal, the convoy clawed forward again.
Sumner held on to the deck rail, watching the horizon sway. After the commander put aside his radio, Sumner asked: “What’s going on here?”
The commander, young and straw-blond with pale, vivid squint lines radiating from his eyes, looked Sumner over with a curious and amused expression. “Your cover’s impeccable, Kagan.” The pale etchings in his flesh vanished in the folds of his smile. “I’d heard the Rangers went all out, but you’re amazing.” His little eyes widened to take in Sumner’s braided hair, colorful thread-stitched ears, jaguar-toothed neckband, and faded loincloth. “What tribe are you surveying?”
“Serbota.
“Ah.” His small eyes became deadlier. “Then you can be useful to us.”
Sumner’s insides tightened.
One of the radios squawked several code phrases. The commander stepped past Sumner and peered south across the jogging terrain. “Here they come.”
Several black specks hobbled on the horizon, swimming closer.
“You’re taking Miramol?” Sumner asked, voice vague.
“Taking it?” The commander faced him, amused by the thinness of Sumner’s voice. “We don’t take distorts. There’s been some voor activity in the area, and we’re going to wipe out the tribes that might shelter them.”
Thunder trundled out of the south, expanded to a roar, and ripped the sky above them with a scream wider than ears could hold. Four black-hulled strohlkraft howled overhead, arrowing toward the horizon.
Sumner keeled back against the deck rail. The folds of rock streaming by, the swells and grabens, the benches, spires, and synclines linked and continued. Sumner watched them with numb eyes. They blended together in his tears. They became one.
Violence flexed in Sumner’s chest, and he knew he would corpse many men if he didn’t get away.
He jumped off the troop carrier and rolled when he hit the rocky ground. Behind him, the commander yelled: “Get back here, Kagan! You don’t have permission to leave!”
Sumner kept walking, the heat and the dust splashing at his ankles.
“You’re deserting!” the commander shouted, and one of the troopers sighted his rifle and looked for permission to fire. When the commander nodded, the trooper aimed, but Sumner was gone.
Several of the other men had seen him somersault behind a sand drift, and the commander dispatched a dozen men to track him down. They fanned over the broken land and scanned from the vantage of rock pinnacles, but they never saw that ranger again.
The Blood’s Horizon
Sumner walked north, letting his voorsense lead him into the mountains. At the snowline, where jagged rime rocks burned in scallop rays of the sun, he found a ledged cave hidden from the wind. He cleared out the stone shards and sat down against the back wall.
Psychically spent, he felt ready to sleep or die—but the voor in him thrived. Sumner let Corby move forward in his awareness, watching numbly as the voor took the snakeskin pouch from his side and scattered the magnar’s ashes and bonechips on the ground before him. Sunlight glinted off the boneshards like fragments of time, and Sumner’s gut twisted cold with the guilt he felt for Ardent Fang as well as for the magnar.
You’re tired, Sumner, Corby spoke softly, unstable as smoke. So just watch. I’m going to make you forget your hurt. We are going on a long journey. Together, we will shadowshoot Bonescrolls. His fingers spiraled slowly through the ashes in rhythm to the voor voice inside him. Shadowshooting is timetripping. There are enough kha-remnants here for us to relive all of the magnar’s life. In Iz, every tense is now. But it is not him that I want you to know. His thick hands hovered quietly over the intervolving spirals, and a power unspun in his chest, a power as subtle as the ash was white.
A wind mewled through the disoriented rocks outside the cave and blended into Corby’s voice: It is the Delph I want you to see—the godmind we were born to destroy. The twilight unraveled a cliché of broken colors, wind-long and redder than meat. We are going back twelve centuries, following the kha of this life’s dust to the time of Bonescrolls’ first shape. The look of things seemed to wear thin. Time is a secret hidden from itself. We are going deeper into that secret. We are becoming it.
Sumner’s mind blanked. And suddenly, he dwelled in a warm and dark place, drifting easily, listening to the muffled banging of a door in a ghostly wind. A heartbeat.
Corby understood, and his knowledge became Sumner’s: Iz had taken them back to Bonescrolls’ early life and then across time, pushed on by Corby’s will, to the Delph’s embryonic beginnings: they could feel him glowing in the bloodlight, furled in his humming mist, so slippery and small he seemed about to dim away.
Words passed to Sumner from Corby—chanted words—the voorish litany for the unborn:
You will have a name this time, child. And you will have all the limits that go with having a name. You will have a name this time, because where you are going everything has a name...
Corby moved on, and Sumner felt time accelerate. He glimpsed the fetus of the Delph expanding, somersaulting in its womb, pushing out. Its head scowled into the light, and it skidded out, clotted and gleaming with the remnants of its fetal life. The scene misted away, blurring off into a sweep of images, all rushing by too swiftly to be grasped.
...Where you are going, young one, everything that can happen has happened. Everything that has happened is happening again...
The torrent staggered twice, slowing enough for Sumner to glimpse the infant growing: a black-haired child in an oversized yarmulke, standing midway up the stone stairway of a temple; then, a gangly youth in military fatigues, a six-pointed star dangling beneath an angular, grinning face, jet fighters in the background; then, flying darkness—
...and though you will begin to learn the names of everything in your new life, no matter how many names you learn, no matter what sequence you arrange them in, they will tell you nothing about the source or the end. They exist because you do, to assure yourself that your existence can and does happen, then and now, always, and almost as you yourself imagine it happening...
The rush skipped again, and Sumner observed the young man in combat boots, flight pants, a military shirt opened to the waist. He was lying in tall grass, under leafshadows, a dark, sinewy woman beside him. He held her face in his hands, and the scene roared away.
...but names, young life, will be dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, even though their hunger will be your long traveling, their practice all you will ever endure, their eventual test to perfect the space your passing leaves behind.
***
The cascade of images swirled to a stop. Sumner experienced himself floating in an expansive gallery of curving pastel-green walls. The place fluttered with hushed activity. A semicircle of white leather recliners occupied the center of the gallery, each chair enclosed by glass-paneled equipment and a canopy of fine-meshed iridescent netting. All the recliners were occupied, green-gowned technicians attending each one.
Corby narrowed his focus to one station where a black-haired man with a narrow, composed face lay. This was the one they had traced from the womb—the Delph. The stencil on the breast pocket of his tan fatigues read HALEVY-COHEN.
Corby drew closer, hovering for a moment before brown, wide-spaced eyes and slender nose, the lips full, jaw slim, receding, hair very thick, meticulously combed back from a square forehead. The features expanded to a sheet of diaphanous light, and they focused deeper into him.
His mind opened upon a tumult of images and thoughts, and a disoriented moment passed before even Corby could feel out this man’s name. Jac.
“Jac,” a woman’s voice called. He opened his eyes on an ancient woman, age-loose flesh leaf-brown, huge, dark eyes milky around the edges, sunken, hooded with immedicable sorrow. When she saw that he had awoken, a smile cut across the grain of her face, and she seemed to expand. She threw back her long white hair and bent closer. He could smell the balsam that scented her white caftan.
Nefandi emerged into the hum of sunlight and activated his field immediately. Brightness knocked his vision, and he shifted to his sensex. A line of tribal warriors had formed a semicircle beneath the silver-green foliage of the jungle. They began to hiss and click as soon as he appeared, but they fell silent when he came toward them.
At the end of the main boulevard, several hunters spoke with frantic animation to another warrior and an androg. Desert sand furred both the warrior and the androg with a rosy patina.
Nefandi walked east, through the line of warriors and across the boulevard. Suddenly the dusty warrior pushed aside the hunters and rushed at him. Only the urgent squawking of the né kept him from colliding with the field.
Get away from him, Fang! Drift begged, coming up and tugging at Ardent Fang’s arm. The Mothers have taken care of him. He’s leaving now.
Ardent Fang barked at the one-eyed stranger. Fury pounded in his throat, but the obvious futility of attacking the man held him back. He could see the sheen of the shield around him.
“He killed the magnar!” Ardent Fang bawled. “He has the same light that we saw on the Road. We can’t let him get away.”
Drift clung to his arm. We have no choice. You saw what he did to the né.
Ardent Fang snarled as Nefandi moved past him. “Deadwalker, only your sorcery protects you!”
Nefandi ignored the lionfaced distort, rechecked his direction, and entered the jungle along a narrow gatherer’s trail. If that old blind witch hadn’t lied to him, his work would soon be over. He could return to Cleyre, to a new body, to the simple pleasures of his easy life, and leave behind the heat and the hostility of this place. He ducked beneath a low branch and heard the wood explode against the field. Reluctantly, he shut it down, scanning all about him for others, and hurrying his pace down the trail.
Ardent Fang watched him disappear into the bush. He felt the restless urge to heave a rock after him. Instead, he turned to Drift, and they walked slowly down the boulevard.
We must prepare the dead.
Ardent Fang didn’t acknowledge the seer. He walked with his head slung forward, brow pressed tight above his eyes. “What did the Mothers do to get him out of here?” He kicked a clod of earth to dust. “Why was he here in the first place?”
Drift scavenged for an answer, but before it could respond, the tribesman spit and turned about abruptly. He loped back down the boulevard and shoved brusquely through a crowd of warriors, hissing back at them as he jogged up to the Barrow. Entry forbidden him by tradition, he stooped over the hole and howled. Drift tried to pull him away, but he persisted until a stick-thin, weasel-faced Mother appeared out of the darkness.
“Why are you bawling, breeder?” the Mother asked in her annoyed, reedy voice.
“Tell me where the deadwalker is going.”
The Mother laughed with disdain. “Away, brute.”
Ardent Fang dropped into the hole and grabbed the woman by her shift. The material ripped as he lifted her off her feet and slammed her into the wall. “Where, woman?”
“I-can’t-breathe!” she gasped. He tightened his grip, and she gagged. “To-find-Lo-tus-Face!” Her eyes bugged out, and her lips went taut.
Ardent Fang threw her to the ground and bounded out of the hole. He rolled down the incline and broke into a scramble for the jungle. Drift peered into the burrow and, seeing that the Mother was all right, bolted after Ardent Fang.
The sensors embedded in Nefandi’s skull began a low drawl that burred behind his eyes. The voor must be nearby, though his sensex hadn’t yet picked him out. He pushed through a tangle of fronds and entered a small grove of black pear trees. Flies whined about him, and he nudged the field to its lowest setting. From behind him came the thrash of someone running through the jungle. He swiveled and scanned the way he had come.
The lionfaced warrior leaped into sight through a smoke bush, still a distance off. Nefandi fired a single power burst, but by some incredible fortune the distort rolled to the ground the instant the weapon fired.
Nefandi aimed more carefully and fired a longer burst, and again the warrior lunged out of the way and dashed closer. He already had his knife out, and Nefandi could see the fierce determination in his yellow eyes.
Drift ran hard to keep Ardent Fang in sight, its chest spiked with pain. But no matter how warped its lungs felt, no matter how much its breath seared its throat, it sprinted on, dodging roots and low-lying branches. As long as Ardent Fang stayed in sight, it could cue him to Nefandi’s attacks. Right! it fervently sent, envisioning Nefandi’s impulse to cut off Ardent Fang’s left-dodge.
Ardent Fang spun right, and the blast from Nefandi’s sword ruptured a tree trunk with a clout of noise and a spray of wood splinters.
Roll! Ardent Fang rolled, and another slash of energy frittered the leaves above him. Up left! He swung to his feet and curled left as invisible power chewed the ground beside him to a mash.
Nefandi staggered back, stunned. Ardent Fang closed in, knife low and tilted forward. He prepared to lash out with a long, sustained sweep of ripping energy, but a daring impulse sparked through him, and he hesitated. With his sword angled to the ground, he crouched, eyes alert to every ripple of muscle on the distort leaping at him.
He waited until Ardent Fang poised in mid-leap, level with his face, arms spread, yellow eyes raving. Nefandi threw his field up full. The lunging warrior exploded into a tattering of guts and jumping blood. The force of the impact burst the branches of nearby trees and kicked Drift onto its back, slapping it with a mass of hot roping viscera.
Nefandi shut down the field and rolled to the center of the pear grove. His sensors squealed, and he did a quick scan of the surrounding foliage. A glaucous bodylight shifted stealthily through the undergrowth—yellow-golden, the size of a man. He fired a tight burst at it. The leaves danced and scattered, and the kha-light flashed to nothing.
Still on his belly, he scanned the terrain again. The androg stared at him through the quag of his companion’s entrails, too stunned to move. A bird chattered tentatively, and the derelict sounds of fleeing monkeys muffled away. The sensors in his skull had gone quiet, and he got to his feet slowly. It was finished.
Cleyre loomed closer now. He could smell the chicory coffee he would have while sitting on his blossom-arbored patio. He smiled away his fantasy and went over to inspect the body. Was his victim relieved to die—happy to be liberated from the horror of his lusk? Or had the voor become familiar to him? Perhaps they had shared a life. Useless to ponder.
He used his sword to force aside the tangled brier. Draped over a fallen tree, head cleaved open, a silver puma lay. Nefandi stood baffled and was still pondering how an animal could have had so highly developed a kha when Sumner unfolded from his cover of brambles behind the big cat. He had no kha. The voor held all his psynergy deep within.
Nefandi staggered back, but not before Sumner grabbed his sword arm. He gripped it so hard the muscles unflexed, and the weapon dropped. Nefandi’s mind lurched. The black rainbow-glossed face transfixed him—eyes flat, indifferent, and slow...
Nefandi’s free arm gouge-slashed and got slapped away. He twisted, and the hand clamping his arm squeezed tighter, tugging him forward. A knife flashed in Sumner’s grip, and Nefandi watched the blade slide between his ribs. A scream kicked in his throat. He bucked and thrashed, a dumb hilarity whirling inside him, spinning itself out. His whole body stiffened, and he sagged to the ground, drained, only a shape.
Sumner let the body fall. He looked at the limbs folded like wet cardboard, the fright-glare in the one eye, and a finger twitching, frantic for a signal from the stopped brain.
He bent over to wipe his blade on Nefandi’s shirt, and the hushed voice of the voor opened in him. You trusted me, Sumner, and I did not fail you. We are as good as one now. We are the same.
He sheathed his knife, picked up Nefandi’s sword, and stepped over the body.
Drift, blood-splattered and limping, met him in the clearing of the pear grove. Its bead eyes had clouded over, and at first Sumner felt nothing from it but a cold mist, shadowy and languid. Then the seer’s voice entered his mind: Why didn’t you save him? It held up its hands, slick with Ardent Fang’s blood. You saw what was happening. Why didn’t you save him?
“The voor was holding my kha back, Drift. If I had moved or even thought, we’d both be dead now. I had to let Fang go.”
Drift stared at him, its bloody hands raised. I thought you were human. Its eyes glistened, and its look frayed. It turned away. You’re more voor than man.
Sumner watched after the seer until it passed among the trees and out of sight. Nothing is ever lost—it’s just on its way back, he said to himself.
That thought began a slow loop through his mind—a mantra that set his feet moving, that marched him out of the forest and into the sun-veiled landscape of Skylonda Aptos.
He walked hard through the primeval chaos of faulted, uplifted and folded rock. In a desolate spot, he buried Nefandi’s sword, and then continued his grief-march. When the sky filled with colored vapors, he sat with his back to a stone arch and stared out at the darkening reef of clouds. He had killed Ardent Fang—the way he had killed Bonescrolls, by inaction. He had let the human love in him die. He was a voor, and that awareness immobilized him. Dervishes of red dust spun over the arid flats. Llyr glinted above the horizon, small and glassy. A cold wind deepened.
***
At dawn, Sumner awakened to the sound of metal punching the air—engines. The noise sounded terrifying coming across the barren and shattered land. He mounted the stone arch and witnessed a convoy of yellow and brown troop carriers rumbling across the mangled terrain. Green flags stenciled with black and white pillars stretched over the sides of the treaded vehicles.
Sumner sprinted over swells and folds of maroon rock to intercept the lead carrier. When they spotted him, the convoy bawled to a stop and several men in desert camouflage suits jumped down, rifles ready.
Sumner identified himself, and the men quickly hustled him onto the top deck of the point carrier. With a screech of fatigued metal, the convoy clawed forward again.
Sumner held on to the deck rail, watching the horizon sway. After the commander put aside his radio, Sumner asked: “What’s going on here?”
The commander, young and straw-blond with pale, vivid squint lines radiating from his eyes, looked Sumner over with a curious and amused expression. “Your cover’s impeccable, Kagan.” The pale etchings in his flesh vanished in the folds of his smile. “I’d heard the Rangers went all out, but you’re amazing.” His little eyes widened to take in Sumner’s braided hair, colorful thread-stitched ears, jaguar-toothed neckband, and faded loincloth. “What tribe are you surveying?”
“Serbota.
“Ah.” His small eyes became deadlier. “Then you can be useful to us.”
Sumner’s insides tightened.
One of the radios squawked several code phrases. The commander stepped past Sumner and peered south across the jogging terrain. “Here they come.”
Several black specks hobbled on the horizon, swimming closer.
“You’re taking Miramol?” Sumner asked, voice vague.
“Taking it?” The commander faced him, amused by the thinness of Sumner’s voice. “We don’t take distorts. There’s been some voor activity in the area, and we’re going to wipe out the tribes that might shelter them.”
Thunder trundled out of the south, expanded to a roar, and ripped the sky above them with a scream wider than ears could hold. Four black-hulled strohlkraft howled overhead, arrowing toward the horizon.
Sumner keeled back against the deck rail. The folds of rock streaming by, the swells and grabens, the benches, spires, and synclines linked and continued. Sumner watched them with numb eyes. They blended together in his tears. They became one.
Violence flexed in Sumner’s chest, and he knew he would corpse many men if he didn’t get away.
He jumped off the troop carrier and rolled when he hit the rocky ground. Behind him, the commander yelled: “Get back here, Kagan! You don’t have permission to leave!”
Sumner kept walking, the heat and the dust splashing at his ankles.
“You’re deserting!” the commander shouted, and one of the troopers sighted his rifle and looked for permission to fire. When the commander nodded, the trooper aimed, but Sumner was gone.
Several of the other men had seen him somersault behind a sand drift, and the commander dispatched a dozen men to track him down. They fanned over the broken land and scanned from the vantage of rock pinnacles, but they never saw that ranger again.
The Blood’s Horizon
Sumner walked north, letting his voorsense lead him into the mountains. At the snowline, where jagged rime rocks burned in scallop rays of the sun, he found a ledged cave hidden from the wind. He cleared out the stone shards and sat down against the back wall.
Psychically spent, he felt ready to sleep or die—but the voor in him thrived. Sumner let Corby move forward in his awareness, watching numbly as the voor took the snakeskin pouch from his side and scattered the magnar’s ashes and bonechips on the ground before him. Sunlight glinted off the boneshards like fragments of time, and Sumner’s gut twisted cold with the guilt he felt for Ardent Fang as well as for the magnar.
You’re tired, Sumner, Corby spoke softly, unstable as smoke. So just watch. I’m going to make you forget your hurt. We are going on a long journey. Together, we will shadowshoot Bonescrolls. His fingers spiraled slowly through the ashes in rhythm to the voor voice inside him. Shadowshooting is timetripping. There are enough kha-remnants here for us to relive all of the magnar’s life. In Iz, every tense is now. But it is not him that I want you to know. His thick hands hovered quietly over the intervolving spirals, and a power unspun in his chest, a power as subtle as the ash was white.
A wind mewled through the disoriented rocks outside the cave and blended into Corby’s voice: It is the Delph I want you to see—the godmind we were born to destroy. The twilight unraveled a cliché of broken colors, wind-long and redder than meat. We are going back twelve centuries, following the kha of this life’s dust to the time of Bonescrolls’ first shape. The look of things seemed to wear thin. Time is a secret hidden from itself. We are going deeper into that secret. We are becoming it.
Sumner’s mind blanked. And suddenly, he dwelled in a warm and dark place, drifting easily, listening to the muffled banging of a door in a ghostly wind. A heartbeat.
Corby understood, and his knowledge became Sumner’s: Iz had taken them back to Bonescrolls’ early life and then across time, pushed on by Corby’s will, to the Delph’s embryonic beginnings: they could feel him glowing in the bloodlight, furled in his humming mist, so slippery and small he seemed about to dim away.
Words passed to Sumner from Corby—chanted words—the voorish litany for the unborn:
You will have a name this time, child. And you will have all the limits that go with having a name. You will have a name this time, because where you are going everything has a name...
Corby moved on, and Sumner felt time accelerate. He glimpsed the fetus of the Delph expanding, somersaulting in its womb, pushing out. Its head scowled into the light, and it skidded out, clotted and gleaming with the remnants of its fetal life. The scene misted away, blurring off into a sweep of images, all rushing by too swiftly to be grasped.
...Where you are going, young one, everything that can happen has happened. Everything that has happened is happening again...
The torrent staggered twice, slowing enough for Sumner to glimpse the infant growing: a black-haired child in an oversized yarmulke, standing midway up the stone stairway of a temple; then, a gangly youth in military fatigues, a six-pointed star dangling beneath an angular, grinning face, jet fighters in the background; then, flying darkness—
...and though you will begin to learn the names of everything in your new life, no matter how many names you learn, no matter what sequence you arrange them in, they will tell you nothing about the source or the end. They exist because you do, to assure yourself that your existence can and does happen, then and now, always, and almost as you yourself imagine it happening...
The rush skipped again, and Sumner observed the young man in combat boots, flight pants, a military shirt opened to the waist. He was lying in tall grass, under leafshadows, a dark, sinewy woman beside him. He held her face in his hands, and the scene roared away.
...but names, young life, will be dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, even though their hunger will be your long traveling, their practice all you will ever endure, their eventual test to perfect the space your passing leaves behind.
***
The cascade of images swirled to a stop. Sumner experienced himself floating in an expansive gallery of curving pastel-green walls. The place fluttered with hushed activity. A semicircle of white leather recliners occupied the center of the gallery, each chair enclosed by glass-paneled equipment and a canopy of fine-meshed iridescent netting. All the recliners were occupied, green-gowned technicians attending each one.
Corby narrowed his focus to one station where a black-haired man with a narrow, composed face lay. This was the one they had traced from the womb—the Delph. The stencil on the breast pocket of his tan fatigues read HALEVY-COHEN.
Corby drew closer, hovering for a moment before brown, wide-spaced eyes and slender nose, the lips full, jaw slim, receding, hair very thick, meticulously combed back from a square forehead. The features expanded to a sheet of diaphanous light, and they focused deeper into him.
His mind opened upon a tumult of images and thoughts, and a disoriented moment passed before even Corby could feel out this man’s name. Jac.
“Jac,” a woman’s voice called. He opened his eyes on an ancient woman, age-loose flesh leaf-brown, huge, dark eyes milky around the edges, sunken, hooded with immedicable sorrow. When she saw that he had awoken, a smile cut across the grain of her face, and she seemed to expand. She threw back her long white hair and bent closer. He could smell the balsam that scented her white caftan.
