Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Irina raised her eyebrows, shrugged. “Admittedly, low. But there’s a first time for everything…”

“I can feel something,” Kit said, turning the superegg over in his hands. “Like there’s just a little fragment of power in there— a splinter.”

Mamvish put her tongue down against the superegg, let the tip of it rest there for a moment. Symbols in the Speech once again whirled and glowed in her hide, but they were faint and vague. “Yes,” she said. “I feel it, too. A fragment of a spell, or a collapsed and compacted sequence of a wizardry, no more. And it’s not active.”

“Like it’s on standby,” Darryl said.

Mamvish tilted her head sideways, a “maybe” gesture. “It could be. If there’s a complete spell held inside, it may have been set to stay dormant for a while after this artifact was found.”

“In any case, I can confirm your surveyors’ results,” Irina said. “This object’s very old indeed, and nothing like the kind of spell that Earth wizards were doing half a million years ago, even at what were then their highest levels of organization. Structurally, and in terms of the complexity of the outer shell alone, this is completely different. It feels alien to me.”

“Aren’t you going to try to get it open?” Carmela said.

“We’d have to have a clue as to how,” Irina said. Once more she reached down to touch the superegg, running her hand slowly across its surface. “To use wizardry to operate on an object, you have to know what it is, what it’s made of …and working that out may take us a while. Come on,” Irina said in the Speech, and the sudden burst of power in the words her soft voice spoke shook Kit as if someone had struck him. But the power was all persuasiveness.“Tell us your secret. You’ve been alone so long already— isn’t telling about yourself what you want to do, what you’re all about? Who set you here? What are you for? We’re here to listen!”

Nothing. Kit shook his head, wondering how anything inanimate or otherwise could be unmoved by such power directed at it. But the egg just sat there in his lap, mute.

“Plainly this is going to take more analysis,” Mamvish said with a sigh. “Well, it’s the usual thing: nothing worth finding out about comes easy.”

“What’s that?” Ronan said suddenly.

Everybody looked at him. “That sound,” he said.

Kit realized he, too, had been hearing something in the background, a low, hissing noise like static from a radio in the next room. But now it was sounding closer, or as if someone was turning that radio up. Everyone looked in all directions.

“There,” Mamvish said, both her eyes swiveling to look almost directly back the way they’d come.

Kit’s view was blocked by her bulk: he stood up to see. Then his eyes went wide. In the distance, maybe half a mile away, a tall, dark, twisting shape was wobbling across the landscape toward them, kicking up dust as it came. It was vague, soft-featured, amorphous— but it was getting less vague every moment as that hissing noise got louder.

“Dust devil,” Ronan said, peering past Mamvish. Beside him, Carmela watched its approach openmouthed, her attention distracted from Ronan at least for the moment.

“Saw one of those on the TV news the other night,” Darryl said. “It looked smaller…”

“They can be a mile high,” Kit said, for the moment almost oblivious to the superegg he was holding. “The winds inside are almost as fast as an Earth tornado’s…”

“Now there’s a question,” Darryl said. “If a tornado hits you here and picks you up, what happens then? Does Mars have an Oz?”

“It’s not very likely to hit us,” Mamvish said… and then trailed off as the dust devil swerved and headed right toward them.

To Kit’s slight satisfaction, Carmela gulped. “Mamvish, your shield thingy’ll keep that out, won’t it?”

“Wouldn’t matter much if it didn’t,” Kit said. “You might get some dust in your hair. The air here’s so thin, it could hit you square on and not hurt you.”

The dust devil was still running right at them, as unerringly as if it was on invisible tracks. Mamvish half turned, lifting her head, and her hide darkened: under it, symbols and phrases in the Speech began to twist and flow. Kit sucked in a breath and held it at the feel of the power building around her. She’s really something, he thought, once more frozen in place as all the others were. But no, not all the others— Irina straightened up and came around Mamvish’s side. The parakeet fluttered away to perch on top of the stone outcropping, and Irina’s baby looked up into her face with a strange, silent composure, as Irina went up to stand by Mamvish’s head. She hadn’t said a word out loud in the Speech, but Kit could see the air around her hands trembling with some force that rippled the air like heat.

The hissing grew louder; the dust devil wobbled only a little from side to side as it came at them, blocking half the horizon away with a whirling russet wall of dust. The Speech-symbols under Mamvish’s hide blazed as she reinforced her shield-spell, but she didn’t otherwise move. Then the whirlwind of dust blew right over them.

For a moment they were caught right in the center of the vortex. The hiss became deafening. Kit, standing there with the superegg in his hands, tilted his head back and found himself looking up at a view that even few wizards would ever have seen—the dark golden radiance of the Martian noontime sky, but just a circle of it, completely walled around by the upward-widening, brick-colored cone of a dust devil’s heart. The breath went out of him in wonder. But he was feeling something else as well, and couldn’t understand where it was coming from. I’ve seen this before! But that’s crazy. Where could I ever have seen this?

The moment passed as the dust devil did. A second later it was behind them, wobbling away across the Martian landscape again. Mamvish’s wizardry released them, and they all turned to watch it go.

“What a mess,” Carmela said. Kit had to admit that she had a point. The outcropping and the ground around it, which had been fairly clean after the dune had been blown back, were now almost entirely buried in the finest possible brown-red dust. Much more of it was piled nearly ten feet up the face of the black dune. Darryl whistled softly. Irina, the air around her hands gone quiet again now, clucked softly to her parakeet, which had taken to the air. It flew back to her, sat on her head, and shook its feathers out, raising a small red dust cloud of its own.

“Well,” Mamvish said, looking after the dust devil as it wandered away toward the horizon, “that was unusual…”

“You really think so?” Irina said. “You’ll be telling me you believe in coincidences next.”

Mamvish tilted an eye back toward Irina. “Not as such,” she said, “of course not. It’s safe to say that we’ve been noticed. But by what?”

“The planet?” Ronan said.

Irina threw a thoughtful look at him. “If Mars had a Planetary, we could ask him, her, or it,” she said, “but it doesn’t.” She sighed. “One more mystery.”

“Best we take them one at a time,” Mamvish said.

Kit hefted the superegg, which was getting heavy. “Let’s start with this one,” he said. “What do we do with it?”

“Well, we’ll have to keep trying to find a way to get it open,” Mamvish said. “Bottles like these usually lead to more of the same: the more of them you can open, the more you can find out about the species that left them for you, and why they left them. Some of them are just memorials. Some are cries for help. And some species foresee their own demise and leave you information about how they tried to stop it. If you can make sense of those, you can start working on a way to bring them back.”