Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“What?”

“Look at the floor over there. Is something shining?”

Nita looked where Carmela pointed. “Something green,” she said. “Come on—”

They broke into a trot, heading for the center of the huge floor space. It took a while to get there, but as they drew closer, the glint of green grew stronger and stronger in the light of Nita’s upheld wand, spreading more widely across the floor. By the time they were still a hundred feet or so away, they could see that they were heading into a circle of green designs nearly that wide— a tangle of broad curves or ribbons of verdant color against the paler stone. Some of these green ribbons arced away from the central design, ending in sharp points: some of them seemed to twist back on themselves, narrowing, broadening out again, dividing and sharpening to points again.

At the edge of the design they stopped, Nita holding her wand out over it. The color wasn’t flat: it gleamed, metallic. And there were subtle changes in its color and in the way it reflected the light when Nita moved the wand slightly. “Mela,” she said, “it’s not solid.”

They both got down on their knees to look at one of the broad strokes of the design. “It’s all inlaid,” Nita said. “Little thin pieces of metal…” They bent over it together. It was surprising to Nita how closely she had to look to see the separate elements in the delicate tangle of inlaid metal. “How in the worlds did they do this?”

“Wizardry?” Carmela said. “Are there wizards who’re artists?”

“Sure. And if a wizard did this, no question, he or she or it was an artist.” Nita looked more closely at the end of the nearest ribbon, a sharp point. “But look how this line starts, and then it starts weaving back and forth in the main design …It’s like the letters on the walls.”

“But curved, not straight,” Carmela said, putting out a finger to touch one long, curving letter or character. “A different font. Don’t know if it’s more formal or less. But this is soooo detailed…” She bent close, squinting at the long, delicate thin-and-thick strokes of the alien lettering as they tangled among many others, all making their way like twining plant fronds toward the center of the design. “This part is— I think it’s just names. Nouns, but no verbs.”

After a moment Carmela shook her head, got up, and stood with her hands on her hips, looking over the design. Nita realized that Carmela was trying to get to grips with the whole pattern. But it was hard, from way over at one side like this: and if you ventured into the design, it made even less sense, or you got caught up in the fine detail—

Hmm, Nita thought. Bobo?

You rang?

Got the stair-making routine on tap?

Right here.

Nita watched the air beside her harden into an almost invisible flight of steps up over the design. She felt for the first one, found it, made sure of the width and the depth of the treads, and then trotted steadily up about two storeys into the air. Carmela watched her go. This high enough? the peridexis said.

Just fine, Nita said, looking down at the great design. From up here, her sudden suspicion was instantly confirmed. The design wasn’t random. Up here you could see the larger shapes—the four uplifted claws, the six rear legs, the long tail with its fierce spine. Is it really a sting, or something else? But the whole creature had been designed as if in calligraphic pen strokes, thicks and thins, and was bent back on itself almost into a spiral: the head and foremost claws in the middle of the design, the rear legs and finally the tail defining the outside of a circle or disc. “Mela,” Nita said, “it’s one of our scorpion guards. The design’s stylized, but you couldn’t miss it.”

“Okay. Where’s the head, and where’s the tail?”

“The head’s near the middle. No, more to your right. The tail’s at the edge, on your left.”

Carmela headed for the center of the design. From above, more light came dropping slowly down in S’reee’s wake, her near eye glinting in the silver light of Nita’s wand. “Nothing different,” S’reee said. “More words that I can’t read, all the way up.” She cocked that eye down at what lay below her and Nita. “But you two seem to have found something.”

Together they made their way down to floor level. Carmela had come to the scorpion’s head and was kneeling on the densely inlaid metal. As Nita walked over, Carmela looked up with an expression of absolute excitement. “This is it!” she said.

“What?” Nita said.

“Where it starts,” Carmela said. “Not an index. It’s the start of a story. The words are simpler here. I can see them like I couldn’t right away on the walls.”

Nita went down on one knee again and touched the green metal of the design. From within it she got a faint, faint sense of some power stirring. “It may be helping you,” she said.

“I can use some help,” Carmela said, without looking up. “This isn’t easy…” She put a finger on a spot that was a shade of green darker than the rest of the design, in the right position to be an eye.

“‘First there is the Old World,’” Carmela read. She leaned in to look more closely at the long, twisting line of alien charactery. “The tenses in this are all present tense, as if it’s happening now for them. Does that make sense?”

Nita shrugged. S’reee flipped her tail. “There are any number of species who see the present and past as one. Go on.”

Carmela squinted at the writing, tracing it with a finger, occasionally shuffling along a little way on her knees to pick up the next part. “‘And the Old World has swung in its— old orbit?’ Mmm, no, it’s more formal: make that ‘its ancient round’— ‘since the First People awoke in the heart of the worlds.’ No— ‘in the centermost of the Circles.’”

Carmela paused, then went on with increased certainty. “‘So that when the World awoke, life and thought at last— were company for?— companioned with the star which for long had burned alone in the night at the Circles’ heart.’” Carmela scooted along as the sentence stretched away from the scorpion’s head, then picked up the thread again as it twisted and coiled among many others. “‘Yet’—Wait a minute. No, I see it. ‘Yet with the new life came the promise of a death that should come out of the darkness, as the light and life had done.’” She paused, and scowled at the next sentence for a moment as if perplexed, before translating it: “‘And the First People swore that it might be so for others, but should not be so for them.’”

“Huh,” Nita said. “Is that a species having its Choice, or fighting it? Or just refusing it?”

“No telling.” Carmela scooted farther along in the diagram on her knees, then sat back on her heels for a moment as she looked down at it. “But I think maybe they had different ideas about how to keep this death from happening.” She bent down to look more closely at the long, inlaid sentences, seeming to read them more quickly now. “Let me just paraphrase; the straight translating is tough to do fast. The people here— or the countries? Maybe the cities. It doesn’t say anything about how many people we’re talking about— Anyway, it looks like they split up in a lot of different ways.” Carmela paused, frowned. “It might mean in terms of distance, or mentally. Or both. But it looks like the biggest and strongest groups swallowed up the smaller ones, or stamped them out. Finally there were only two big groups left. All the clans or cities ended up either in one camp or the other…”

As Carmela spoke, Nita felt herself coming up in goosebumps. A twitch, a tingle that wouldn’t go away along the skin and the nerves: the feeling of little feet scurrying, scurrying over her brain. And out at the edge of things, a sense of darkness leaning in from those walls, the world going quiet to listen…