Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

But this… this is just strange.

The listing did have some unusual descriptions of physical status. One, attributed to one of Roshaun’s great-great-grandmothers, was Indeterminate. A couple of others said Exhaled. Nita blinked. Whatever that means! But the complete lack of a physical status for Roshaun left Nita bemused. She reached out to the listing and touched a different name, feeling the small sizzle of power that spoke of active wizardry indwelling in a self. All the names had it, dead or alive. But when she touched Roshaun’s name—

No sizzle: a feeling as if the manual page was nothing but ordinary paper. It’s as if not even the Powers That Be are sure what’s happened to him. How can that be? I don’t get it.

And if even They don’t get it—

Nita let the manual’s pages fall forward on the finger that held her place. Whatever it means, it also means that Roshaun’s not dead! Or not dead yet. Or something. And whatever else I might think about what Dairine’s up to, at least she’s not nuts, or in denial. She’s looking for somebody she’s got at least a chance of finding. Maybe the smallest chance imaginable… but still a chance.

Nita spent the next few moments just getting hold of herself …for she’d been shaking, afraid of what she was about to find. Which just goes to show that I should’ve done this a long time ago. Maybe I could have saved myself this grief with Dairine! The shock of relief was almost as hard to bear as the shock she’d braced herself for, that final awful certainty from which there would have been no retreat.

Finally she flipped the manual open again, riffling through to the section holding the directory for Earth. Nita had a quick-reference “bookmark” page installed at the front, showing names of wizards she knew well or had worked with either frequently or occasionally. The name she was looking for was almost at the top. Callahan, DAIRINE R. Present location: Sunplace, Old Continent, Wellakh. Nita raised her eyebrows. Okay, but doing what? she thought. Arrival time: JD 2454274.10012. Power rating, 5.45 +/- .55… Nita eyed her sister’s power level: it was lower than she’d ever seen it. Then again, what’s this supposed to be? She looked curiously at the listing beside it, one she couldn’t remember having seen before. It said, Under augmentation: augment level 3.2 +/- 2.2. She frowned. That’s a new one. What’s she up to?

She put her finger on the listing. “Coordinates, please?”

They displayed on the page. At the same time, a voice said in the back of her head, You know, if you’d just ask me, I’d do the gating and take you there.

“Bobo,” Nita said, “I appreciate the offer. I just want to make sure I don’t lose the hang of doing it the hard way.”

You’re just a glutton for punishment, the peridexis said.

“You and I are going to have to sit down—as much as you can sit, anyway—and have a long talk about—”

How we can be talking at all? Bobo said. At least he didn’t sound injured. I guess I wonder myself. But go on, do your spell the hard way.

Nita jiggled the charm bracelet on her wrist until the gating charm came up. Out of it she pulled a long, blue-glowing thread of spell, a single word-character in the Speech. This she drew down until it touched Dairine’s entry in the manual, hooking to its location parameters. Then Nita let go of the strand of light. When it snapped back into the charm, it pulled with it a whole new chain of characters, swallowed them up, and blazed, ready to go.

Nita stood up and shoved the manual into the waiting otherspace pocket. Then she pulled on the charm again, and that long line of glowing blue light slid out: she dropped it on the floor, where it went a fierce molten gold and stretched into a circle of Speech-words, ready to knot itself up in the Wizard’s Knot. Nita looked down at the glowing words and slowly began to speak them, turning as she spoke.

The room went silent. Darkness pressed in. As she completed the spell and pronounced the syllables of the Wizard’s Knot, everything went dark.

Moments later she found herself standing on a terrace of some smooth, glittering dark-golden stone. Behind her, in a sheer stone wall, was a series of tall, glassy doors, like the entry to a school or the front of a theater, leading into some dim, hard-to-see interior.

Maybe fifty yards in front of Nita, the terrace ended in a meter-high railing that followed the terrace’s curve hundreds of feet along to either side and out of sight. Out past the rail she got a glimpse of wide gardens far below, fading off into a barer landscape. Glancing from side to side, Nita saw that the terrace itself was cantilevered well out from the surface of the huge, relatively smooth needle of stone behind her, in the base of which the doors were set.

Nita tilted her head back, trying to see the top of the peak above. A few hundred feet, maybe— It was hard to tell. The blue-green sky was full of clouds: as she watched, one drifted straight into and around the top of that needle of stone, obscuring it. More terraces were visible above, staggered around the surface of the uprising spear of stone, up to the cloud and past it.

Nita glanced around, wondering where to go from here. Her transport wizardry had built into it a typical so-called “decent interval” offset; you’d be deposited somewhere within, say, a hundred meters of the person you were seeking, but the wizardry wouldn’t drop you right into that person’s lap. So let’s see …Down the right side of the curve, nothing was visible but featureless, shining stone. To the left, though, maybe fifty yards down, Nita spotted a single small door, all by itself. But wait. Not a door. That’s a gate. It’s got bars—

Nita reached sideways and retrieved her manual from the otherspace pocket— for when a wizard was visiting a world where wizardry was practiced in the open, his manual was his passport— and walked toward that gate.

Above her, that cloud moved away. On the stony spire’s far side, the sun came out, throwing a long path of shadow down the wall, over the gate and Nita, and out to the terrace’s edge. But as she got close to the gate, she saw a light as intense pouring out of it, streaming in a narrow bar-striped ribbon out across the terrace.

Nita stared. Oooookay, she thought. Unusual. She walked slowly to the gate, tucking her manual under her armpit, and reached for her charm bracelet, pinching one small glassy lens-charm between finger and thumb and saying a few words in the Speech under her breath. A fragment of spell-shielding ran up and over her free hand and nearly to her elbow, like an oven mitt of thickened air. She wiggled her fingers to make sure that it felt right, and then stuck the shielded hand into that light.

Nothing happened. Just sunlight? Nita thought. Weird, unless there’s a window on the far side of the mountain. She shook the shield-spell back down her arm: it vanished. Then she peered around through the bars of the gate.

Her mouth dropped open. Sunlight, she thought. Inside the gate was a huge, domed, circular room nearly as wide across as the entire width of the spire of stone. Inside it, floating maybe three feet above the floor, was a sun.

Nita leaned against the gate, staring at the burning, dark-golden globe that hung there. It looked to be about fifty feet in diameter. Blobby black foot-long sunspots sailed slowly across its surface, the fiery red-gold plasma they pushed through getting all torn up by their magnetic fields. Plasma writhed and stretched away from the surface in bright filaments as the sunspots plowed stubbornly through it like inkblots with a mission. Elsewhere, sticking up off the surface like fuzz off a ball of yarn, spiky prominences licked into the upper reaches of the star’s atmosphere, frayed at their ends and fell back again. If you held still, you could just see the star’s rotation, as slow as watching sunrise. As Nita watched, movement off to the right caught her eye as someone walked around the side of the great globe and stood with her back to Nita, looking up at it.